Chapter XXVIII: The Escape

A howl of rage and disappointment arose when the slave delivered his message. But the attack which was now expected did not come.

“They intend to starve us out,” was the scout’s conjecture.

Lieutenant Butler glanced at the hole in the roof.

“Yes, I think we’d better try that,” assented the scout. “We can be no worse off than here, if we can get up there, and we may discover something.”

“Ve iss all dead togedder!” groaned Henselman, but when he saw the other members of the party begin to tear up the net for the purpose of twisting its cords into ropes, the hope of escape caused him to lend a hand.

Though the net was large, and therefore presented abundant material, the work of cutting out the cords in such a manner that they could be used was not easy. But the ropes, hand-twisted, grew in size and length, until the scout declared they had enough for their experiment.

Out of the ropes he fashioned a long lasso, and, standing in the center of the room, he hurled its noose at a supporting roof beam which projected just beneath the hole.

At the second cast he caught the beam with the loop, and when he had drawn it fast he ascended the rope, hand over hand, with all the dexterity of a trained acrobat. It did not take the skillful scout long to reach the opening. There, standing on the end of the beam, with his head thrust through the opening, he looked about.

“There is a gallery here, which leads to the dome,” he announced. “In the other direction it ends at a stone door, which I suppose is impassable. Just stay here while I look about a minute.”

He crawled through the opening, and placed his feet in the wide gallery.

Passing upward, he found that the gallery became a winding stairway which led into the dome. This was a round cupola, with windows overlooking the valley and the adjacent hills. He was astonished by the view to be had from those windows. Far off he could even see the conelike hill of magnetic iron which had affected the compasses, and nearer at hand, though quite distant, the white, flat stone standing upright like the wall of a tent, on which that message of the heliograph had been flashed. But there was apparently no way of escape from the dome except by a suicidal leap from one of the windows.

Below him he saw masses of Indians moving about in apparent excitement.

“Even if we could get down from here, we should be right in the midst of them,” was his thought.

When he had retraced his steps to the stairway and gallery and had gone downward and in the other direction to the stone door, which he could not even shake, he returned to the opening in the roof of the room. He crawled through to the beam, and rested on it, while he spoke to those below, telling them of his discoveries.

“I don’t know that we’ll be better off up here, or in the dome, than down there,” he admitted, “but we’ll at least have a better outlook, and that’s something.”

Lawler grasped the rope and began to climb it.

The scout permitted him to ascend to a seat beside him on the beam.

“I think now, lieutenant,” he said, “that it would be well to make a sort of harness, or chair, for the young lady, in that end of the rope, after which we will hoist her up to this point. Perhaps before she ascends it will be best for you to come up here and help us to lift her.”

“But I can climb,” she protested.

Nevertheless, Lieutenant Butler, assisted by Bounderby, knotted together a sort of combined chair and harness, in which she could sit, and which would support her. They saw she was too weak from her trying experience to attempt to climb the rope, and they had no thought of permitting her to try it.

Having done this, Lieutenant Butler climbed up to the perch occupied by the scout and Lawler, and all three men then lent a hand in hoisting her up to that point.

It was a hard pull, for the footing was not good, but she aided herself by pushing with her feet against the wall.

Henselman came next, in the chair she had used, assisting himself all he could, but groaning prodigiously; and he was followed by Professor Bounderby.

When they stepped out into the gallery, they took the rope with them; they had also brought the remnants of the big net, thinking they might be of further use.

Professor Bounderby was delighted with the view from the dome, and at once began to set down his impressions in his notebook. The others began to discuss possible ways of escape.

As he looked out at the white, tentlike rock in the distance, Buffalo Bill had a happy thought.

“Lieutenant Butler,” he said, “it would be possible, I suppose, for you to flash a message from here to the face of that rock. Or is the sun not just right for it now?”

The face of the lieutenant lighted up at the suggestion.

“We can do it,” he said. “Lucky they didn’t take our things from us. Of course if no one is near the rock the message would be useless, but we can try it.”

For the next few minutes Butler and Lawler busied themselves with getting the heliograph together and in working order, adjusting its mirrors to the sun, and training them on that white wall.

“Major Fernald is out there somewhere,” said Butler, his face flushed with hope. “The chances are not great, but he may happen to be where he will see the flashes. I’m sure we can strike that rock with them. The position of the sun in this window is all right for it, and the heliograph is in working order now.”

Then he sighted the machine at the rock, and soon began to flash his message for help.

“The only thing to do,” he said, “is to keep it up—repeat it over and over. If they’re not there, or near there now, they may come there some time this afternoon. And we can try it again to-morrow; keep it going all day. This is a great idea, Cody. We can hold those bloody Aztecs back with our revolvers, and stay in here a week, even if we haven’t any food, and perhaps before we’re actually starved out we can reach the major.”

He worked with enthusiasm.

Buffalo Bill trained his binoculars on the white rock, and could see the flashes playing and flitting on its surface.

Hour after hour Lieutenant Butler continued his work, and when he tired, young Lawler took it up, so that a succession of messages was being sent continuously.

Over and over they said the same thing:

“We are prisoners in the temple in the valley, which you can
see from the cliff walls. We are doomed. Miss Fernald is
with us. Come to our help.

“BUTLER.”

While this was going on, the Aztecs were not idle. They discovered soon that the prisoners had escaped from their prison room and were in the temple dome. They crowded the gallery and filled the stairway, before the scout and those with him knew that the escape from the prison room had been found out.

Cody saw that the stone door was still closed, though doubtless the Aztecs had come through it.

“We’ll charge the rascals by and by, if we have to, and clear them out of there,” he said, “and perhaps when we do we may be able to get through that door. It might let us reach the ground.”

“Bud voult dot hellup us?” said the despairing Henselman. “Ve coult pe kilt yoost so soon as dey seen us. Id iss no use. Ve iss all dead men togedder.”

The talk of reaching Major Fernald with the heliograph had aroused Henselman’s hope a bit at first, but that hope died utterly as the hours passed without result. He saw the sun sinking, and knew that night was coming when no more messages could be sent.

“Unt maype to-morrow vill be dark like id vas yisterday,” he urged, “unt ve can’t sent no messaches at all. Id iss no use.”

Bounderby rebuked him at intervals, even though the professor’s courage had weakened until it was little better than that of the German.

“Henselman, I am heartily ashamed of you!” the professor would declare. “You are in no more danger than the rest of us. Think what fine material this will make for my lecture, when we escape from here.”

As the sun sank, and Butler declared no more messages could be sent that afternoon, a strange commotion was seen near the wall of the valley.

Indians on the highway there were seen running toward the temple. As they came nearer and met others, these began to run, too. Then behind them, in the dust of the highway, the forms of white men were seen, and reports of rifles sounded, the smoke puffs from the guns leaping now and then out of the dust cloud.

Buffalo Bill swung his hat and cheered.

“Help at last!” he said. “Lieutenant Butler, your messages have been seen. If I’m not mistaken, there come Major Fernald and his gallant followers. We are saved!”

Henselman leaped to his feet. “Vere?” he said, then he, too, swung his hat, roaring: “Ve are safed! Ve are safed!”

Miss Fernald leaned from a window of the dome, looking with moist eyes across the valley.

“My brother!” she whispered. “My brave brother!”

In a little while the forms of the men who were driving the Indians before them could be seen more plainly. They were coming up at a swift pace, on foot, and were shooting at every Indian they saw, thus carrying consternation into the midst of the Aztecs, who saw their friends falling slain by those mysterious fire sticks.

The Aztecs near the temple were thrown into a panic, as the white men charged them, shooting at them, and tumbling many of them down, wounded or dead.

The Indians who had crowded the gallery and stairway leading to the dome vanished through that stone door; but before Buffalo Bill and his companions could get down to it the door was closed and immovable.

Though they hammered on it, they could not shake it; nor could they find any means of opening it. It seemed set in a groove, in which it no doubt slid, but their utmost exertions would not move it.

Major Fernald had more than twenty men with him, and they conducted themselves like heroes.

In spite of the tremendous force which they might have expected would oppose them, they had climbed the cliff walls into the valley, and then had charged with sublime heroism upon the Indians between them and the shining temple mentioned in the heliograph message which they had fortunately seen flashing on that tentlike stone so far away.

Right into the temple they came, firing at every Indian seen; and so great was the scare they created, and so terrible the fear in which the Indians stood of those death-dealing fire sticks, that the Aztecs fled pellmell, scattering in every direction.

Some of the priests opposed them at the altar and before the sacrificial stone, only to fall dead there. But now that they were in the temple itself, they did not see the prisoners. They discovered at length, however, that they were in the high dome, and they found a way to get up to it.

They arrived at the door which shut the prisoners in, but from that side the door was not difficult to move; they had but to throw their weight against it, and it slipped along in its groove, opening for the prisoners a way to freedom.

Emily Fernald fell with hysterical sobbing into the arms of her brother.

Not many words were spent in telling how Major Fernald’s party, after long searching, had returned toward the point from which they had started, and while so doing had passed near the tentlike rock, and there had seen the heliograph messages; time was too precious to be wasted in much talk.

The prisoners and their rescuers hurried down from the dome, and made haste to get out of the valley of Zataclin while the fright of the Aztecs lasted.

They gained the hills beyond the cuplike valley, and by the stars found a northerly course, which they hoped would take them out of danger before morning.

When morning arrived the sky was again gray and cloudy and the compasses refused to perform their mission. But under the expert guidance of Buffalo Bill the party held as true a course as possible, so that on the second day they were far from the valley of the mysterious Aztecs of Zataclin. It was so bewildering a region that they did not care to seek it again; but were content to let the bloody-red priests and people live there undisturbed, as they had done from time immemorial.

“I think you should be content to go back to the ranch for a while, and stay with father, Emily,” said her brother, when they all had crossed the border and were on their way to the town of Bellona. “It seems to me that you’ve had enough adventures and perils for any foolhardy girl! Anyway, whatever you think about it, I simply refuse to take you again with this expedition, if it should be sent out again.”

Lieutenant Butler, for reasons of his own, heartily agreed with this counsel; but he maintained a dignified and discreet silence. In his own mind, however, he resolved to try to persuade the girl whom he loved—if persuasion were needed—not to expose herself to dangers and hardships in future. He was greatly relieved when Emily made known her own wishes in the matter.

“Already I have decided to return to the ranch,” she said quietly.

“I’m very glad, dear,” said the major, and then he added in a lighter tone: “We’re approaching Bellona, a small garrison town. I expect to find letters from Colonel Garland there, and I may be ordered to proceed into another section of the district. In that case, Butler and Lawler will escort you to Klamath.”

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