Hearts of Three 60

Hearts of Three 60

With the coming of daylight his growing terror added wings to his

thought, and he achieved a new and profoundly simple theory of escape.

Since he could not climb up, and since he could not get out through the

sides themselves, then the only possible remaining way was down. Fool

that he was! He might have been working through the cool night hours,

and now he must labour in the quickly increasing heat. He applied

himself in an ecstasy of energy to digging down through the mass of

crumbling bones. Of course, there was a way out. Else how did the funnel

drain? Otherwise it would have been full or part full of water from the

rains. Fool! And thrice times thrice a fool!

 

He dug down one side of the wall, flinging the rubbish into a mound

against the opposite side. So desperately did he apply himself that he

broke his finger-nails to the quick and deeper, while every finger-tip

was lacerated to bleeding. But love of life was strong in him, and he

knew it was a life-and-death race with the sun. As he went deeper, the

rubbish became more compact, so that he used the muzzle of his rifle

like a crowbar to loosen it, ere tossing it up in single and double

handfuls.

 

By mid-forenoon, his senses beginning to reel in the heat, he made a

discovery. Upon the wall which he had uncovered, he came upon the

beginning of an inscription, evidently rudely scratched in the rock by

the point of a knife. With renewed hope, his head and shoulders down in

the hole, he dug and scratched for all the world like a dog, throwing

the rubbish out and between his legs in true dog-fashion. Some of it

fell clear, but most of it fell back and down upon him. Yet had he

become too frantic to note the inefficiency of his effort.

 

At last the inscription was cleared, so that he was able to read:

 

Peter McGill, of Glasgow. On March 12, 1820,

I escaped from the Pit of Hell by this passage by

digging down and finding it.

 

A passage! The passage must be beneath the inscription! Torres now

toiled in a fury. So dirt-soiled was he that he was like some huge,

four-legged, earth-burrowing animal. The dirt got into his eyes, and, on

occasion, into his nostrils and air passages so as to suffocate him and

compel him to back up out of the hole and sneeze and cough his breathing

apparatus clear. Twice he fainted. But the sun, by then almost directly

overhead, drove him on.

 

He found the upper rim of the passage. He did not dig down to the lower

rim; for the moment the aperture was large enough to accommodate his

lean shape, he writhed and squirmed into it and away from the destroying

sun-rays. The cool and the dark soothed him, but his joy and the

reaction from what he had undergone sent his pulse giddily up, so that

for the third time he fainted.

 

Recovered, mouthing with black and swollen lips a half-insane chant of

gratefulness and thanksgiving, he crawled on along the passage. Perforce

he crawled, because it was so low that a dwarf could not have stood

erect in it. The place was a charnel house. Bones crunched and crumbled

under his hands and knees, and he knew that his knees were being worn to

the bone. At the end of a hundred feet he caught his first glimmering of

light. But the nearer he approached freedom, the slower he progressed,

for the final stages of exhaustion were coming upon him. He knew that it

was not physical exhaustion, nor food exhaustion, but thirst exhaustion.

Water, a few ounces of water, was all he needed to make him strong

again. And there was no water.

 

But the light was growing stronger and nearer. He noted, toward the

last, that the floor of the passage pitched down at an angle of fully

thirty degrees. This made the way easier. Gravity drew him on, and

helped every failing effort of him, toward the source of light. Very

close to it, he encountered an increase in the deposit of bones. Yet

they bothered him little, for they had become an old story, while he was

too exhausted to mind them.

 

He did observe, with swimming eyes and increasing numbness of touch,

that the passage was contracting both vertically and horizontally.

Slanting downward at thirty degrees, it gave him an impression of a

rat-trap, himself the rat, descending head foremost toward he knew not

what. Even before he reached it, he apprehended that the slit of bright

day that advertised the open world beyond was too narrow for the egress

of his body. And his apprehension was verified. Crawling unconcernedly

over a skeleton that the blaze of day showed him to be a man’s, he

managed, by severely and painfully squeezing his ears flat back, to

thrust his head through the slitted aperture. The sun beat down upon his

head, while his eyes drank in the openness of the freedom of the world

that the unyielding rock denied to the rest of his body.

 

Most maddening of all was a running stream not a hundred yards away,

tree-fringed beyond, with lush meadow-grass leading down to it from his

side. And in the tree-shadowed water, knee-deep and drowsing, stood

several cows of the dwarf breed peculiar to the Valley of Lost Souls.

Occasionally they flicked their tails lazily at flies, or changed the

distribution of their weight on their legs. He glared at them to see

them drink, but they were evidently too sated with water. Fools! Why

should they not drink, with all that wealth of water flowing idly by!

 

They betrayed alertness, turning their heads toward the far bank and

pricking their ears forward. Then, as a big antlered buck came out from

among the trees to the water’s edge, they flattened their ears back and

shook their heads and pawed the water till he could hear the splashing.

But the stag disdained their threats, lowered his head, and drank. This

was too much for Torres, who emitted a maniacal scream which, had he

been in his senses, he would not have recognised as proceeding from his

own throat and larynx.

 

The stag sprang away. The cattle turned their heads in Torres’

direction, drowsed, their eyes shut, and resumed the flicking of flies.

With a violent effort, scarcely knowing that he had half-torn off his

ears, he drew his head back through the slitted aperture and fainted on

top of the skeleton.

 

Two hours later, though he did not know the passage of time, he regained

consciousness, and found his own head cheek by jowl with the skull of

the skeleton on which he lay. The descending sun was already shining

into the narrow opening, and his gaze chanced upon a rusty knife. The

point of it was worn and broken, and he established the connection. This

was the knife that had scratched the inscription on the rock at the base

of the funnel at the other end of the passage, and this skeleton was the

bony framework of the man who had done the scratching. And Alvarez

Torres went immediately mad.

 

“Ah, Peter McGill, my enemy,” he muttered. “Peter McGill of Glasgow who

betrayed me to this end.—This for you!—And this!—And this!”

 

So speaking, he drove the heavy knife into the fragile front of the

skull. The dust of the bone which had once been the tabernacle of Peter

McGill’s brain arose in his nostrils and increased his frenzy. He

attacked the skeleton with his hands, tearing at it, disrupting it,

filling the pent space about him with flying bones. It was like a

battle, in which he destroyed what was left of the mortal remains of the

one time resident of Glasgow.

 

Once again Torres squeezed his head through the slit to gaze at the

fading glory of the world. Like a rat in the trap caught by the neck in

the trap of ancient Maya devising, he saw the bright world and day dim

to darkness as his final consciousness drowned in the darkness of death.

 

But still the cattle stood in the water and drowsed and flicked at

flies, and, later, the stag returned, disdainful of the cattle, to

complete its interrupted drink.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XXVIII

 

 

Not for nothing had Regan been named by his associates, The Wolf of Wall

Street! While usually no more than a conservative, large-scale player,

ever so often, like a periodical drinker, he had to go on a rampage of

wild and daring stock-gambling. At least five times in his long career

had he knocked the bottom out of the market or lifted the roof off, and

each time to the tune of a personal gain of millions. He never went on a

small rampage, and he never went too often.

 

He would let years of quiescence slip by, until suspicion of him was

lulled asleep and his world deemed that the Wolf was at last grown old

and peaceable. And then, like a thunderbolt, he would strike at the men

and interests he wished to destroy. But, though the blow always fell

like a thunderbolt, not like a thunderbolt was it in its inception. Long

months, and even years, were spent in deviously preparing for the day

and painstakingly maturing the plans and conditions for the battle.

 

Thus had it been in the outlining and working up of the impending

Waterloo for Francis Morgan. Revenge lay back of it, but it was revenge

against a dead man. Not Francis, but Francis’ father, was the one he

struck against, although he struck through the living into the heart of

the grave to accomplish it. Eight years he had waited and sought his

chance ere old R.H.M.——Richard Henry Morgan——had died. But no chance had

he found. He was, truly, the Wolf of Wall Street, but never by any luck

had he found an opportunity against the Lion—for to his death R.H.M. had

been known as the Lion of Wall Street.

 

So, from father to son, always under a show of fair appearance, Regan

had carried the feud over. Yet Regan’s very foundation on which he built

for revenge was meretricious and wrongly conceived. True, eight years

before R.H.M.’s death, he had tried to double-cross him and failed; but

he never dreamed that R.H.M. had guessed. Yet R.H.M. had not only

guessed but had ascertained beyond any shadow of doubt, and had promptly

and cleverly double-crossed his treacherous associate. Thus, had Regan

known that R.H.M. knew of his perfidy, Regan would have taken his

medicine without thought of revenge. As it was, believing that R.H.M.

was as bad as himself, believing that R.H.M., out of meanness as mean as

his own, without provocation or suspicion, had done this foul thing to

him, he saw no way to balance the account save by ruining him, or, in

lieu of him, by ruining his son.

 

And Regan had taken his time. At first Francis had left the financial