The Lost Valley Part 22

"Well, Mr. Bryce," said the man in front, "what have you got to say for yourself?"

"It's a funny thing," remarked Bryce, with the adventures of Mr. c.u.mshaw and the late Mr. Bradby in his mind, "it's funny how history repeats itself."

The leader made a step forward and stared intently at Bryce. "You're the man right enough," he said. "Where's your pal?"

"Ask me something easy," sneered Bryce, "and I'd be obliged if you'd let me drop my hands awhile. This is getting fairly tiresome."

"You should have thought of that before you started that business," the other one reminded him. "It's rather late now to be finding out the flaws in your plans."

The sneering smile on Mr. Bryce's face broadened into a grin of triumph.

"Didn't you ever hear the proverb about gla.s.s-houses and the people who live in them?" he enquired blandly.

The first speaker stared at him, but the other one said impatiently, "Finish him off, Alick, and let's get it over."

The man called Alick answered in a subdued voice. Bryce did not catch what he said, but supposed it to be a counsel of caution. His smile grew in intensity, so much so that Alick snapped at him. "What the deuce are you grinning at, you fat fool?" he demanded.

"You'll know soon enough," Bryce said with a chuckle. He looked right past them into the shadows of the trees, on his face the joyful expression of a man who sees the long-locked gates of his prison swing open before him. Both men whirled round with a chorus of oaths. They were quite positive that Bryce's mate had stolen a march on them and crept up behind their backs. They had their heads turned away but for the fraction of a second, but the time, short though it was, was plenty long enough for Mr. Bryce. With an agility, remarkable in a man of his weight and state of health, he faded into the landscape like some fat fairy.

"Fooled!" said Alick's companion, and he whipped round to face his prisoner, only to find that the keen-brained Mr. Bryce had vanished as completely as if he had been blown off the face of the earth.

"Nice pair of goats we are," remarked Alick disgustedly.

The other said nothing, but stood for a moment in a state of indecision.

At that precise instant a pencil of flame shot out from one of the trees immediately in front of them, and Alick dropped his revolver with a howl of pain.

"He's winged me," he said, and applied to Mr. Bryce an epithet not usually heard in polite society.

His mate fired at the tree from which the shot had evidently come, but the bullet did nothing more than flatten itself against the trunk in a shower of dust and dry bark. Mr. Bryce's revolver spoke once again. This time he failed to register.

"The sooner we get out of this the better," said Alick, with one hand clasped to his injured shoulder. "The beggar'll riddle us both if we stop here."

The other man grunted his approval of the suggestion and proceeded to carry it into effect at once.

"Better look where you are going," Alick advised. "That other chap's about somewhere, perhaps waiting for us."

The other consigned both Bryce and his a.s.sistant to a place more noted for its warmth than its comfort. Despite their forebodings Mr. c.u.mshaw did not put in an appearance, and they gained the shelter of the thick timber in safety.

Once he was sure that they had really departed Mr. Bryce stepped out from behind his tree, first, however, with commendable caution reloading the heavy revolver he carried. The smile was still flickering about the corners of his mouth, but there was a little wrinkle of anxiety across his forehead.

"I wonder where the devil c.u.mshaw's gone?" he remarked to the unresponsive trees. "He went off like a scared rabbit. I'd better hunt for him. I can't get on without him now."

With the laudable intention of finding Mr. c.u.mshaw as soon as possible he began to scour the neighbourhood.

When Mr. c.u.mshaw disappeared so precipitately it was with the idea that he must maintain his freedom at any cost. True, Bryce might be captured, but by the same token he could be rescued just as easily. Though his intentions were right enough he was prevented in the simplest manner possible from carrying them into effect. He went cras.h.i.+ng through the bushes as has already been related, and found himself on the edge of what was nothing more or less than a blind creek. The sides were covered with matted brushwood and were as slippery as gla.s.s. His momentum was such that he could not stop himself in time, and he went head over heels down the side of the gully, and spun on to the boulder-covered bottom like some new and monstrous kind of Catherine wheel. He collided with the rounded surface of one of the big weather-worn rocks which lay strewn about the gully floor like the tremendous marbles of a giant.

The world spun round him in a blaze of colored lights, and his head felt as if it were filled with fireworks. Then in an instant all sensation ceased as though cut off with the clean sweep of a naked sword. Mr.

c.u.mshaw lay still and lifeless under the shadow of the brushwood-covered gully.

Some half an hour later, when Bryce happened on this very spot, he pulled the bushes aside cautiously and peered down almost between his toes; but the shadows lay thick beneath him, and the edge of the gully so projected that he could not see the body of the man for whom he was searching. Slowly he retraced his steps. He was deeply puzzled by this new aspect of the affair. It seemed impossible that c.u.mshaw could have completely disappeared in so short a s.p.a.ce of time, yet the fact that he could not be found was in itself proof conclusive. Had Bryce lingered a couple of seconds longer he would have seen the rapidly-recovering c.u.mshaw turn over on his side, raise one hand to his head, and present a startled face to the scanty rays of light that filtered down to him. In a sense his revival was something more than a recovery; it was a resurrection. The years rolled away in an instant, and he ceased to be the Abel c.u.mshaw who had fallen down the side of the gully and cracked his head against an extra-large sized boulder; he became the Abel c.u.mshaw who had just been knocked into unconsciousness by the b.u.t.t of Mr. Bradby's revolver, and whose head still throbbed with the force of the blow.

He stared uncomprehendingly at the steep sides of the gully; they had no place in his gallery of mental pictures. He had a vague idea that there should be a creek somewhere close at hand. His head was throbbing, pulsing as if some mighty engine were working inside it. He rose unsteadily to his feet and regarded the steep declivities which formed the sides of the gully with a contemplative eye. He decided that they were climbable, but that he must wait awhile before he made the attempt.

He was weak yet; one does not recover instantaneously from a crack on the head. He moved very carefully when he moved at all, and he kept well within the shadows of the overhanging banks. Mr. Bradby was somewhere handy, he argued, extremely ready and willing to finish him off, and it would never do to give him another chance. He had no idea that Mr.

Bradby had died long years ago. Time had telescoped and he was back again in the early eighties. With the addled craftiness of a half-witted creature he set about escaping from the imprisoning walls of the gully-dungeon. Had it been anything else than a blind creek he would have found an exit by following the dry bed, and thus have disappeared entirely from this story. But it was fated otherwise. The one idea that gained any sort of prominence in his mind was that he must climb the side of the gully.

He found a pool of clear rainwater in a little cavity in the dry bed of the creek, and bathed his head in it and drank a little. Its refres.h.i.+ng coolness acted on his jaded body like the sting of a spur on the flank of a lazy horse. He crept cautiously in under the overhang of the bank and searched about for a foothold. Such was not hard to find, and, in less time than it takes to write of it, he was swinging up the side of the bank, clinging to projecting ledges of rock with hands and feet that seemed to possess all the prehensile quality of a monkey's. Once on the top of the bank he burrowed into the ma.s.s of vegetation like some primeval creature taking to earth, a pitiful caricature of the sane, strong man he had been a few short hours before. Cautious and all as he was, his flight was not absolutely noiseless, and so it came about that presently Bryce heard him, and circled round the spot from which the sound came like a wolf heading off a herd of deer.

c.u.mshaw crashed through the bushes and emerged into the open a hundred yards or so ahead of Bryce. The latter caught sight of him at the moment of his emergence and called out to him to stop.

"c.u.mshaw," he called. "Come here!"

The other heard the call and caught his own name, but instead of slackening he accelerated his pace. He did not look round; he was convinced in his own warped mind that his pursuer was none other than the late Mr. Bradby. Accordingly he swung along at such a rate that Bryce soon dropped behind, breathless and dispirited. He sat down on a convenient log and mopped his damp face with a large-sized handkerchief.

Presently his breathing became normal again, and his agitated heart ceased fluttering like a caged bird. He fell to reviewing the position.

The more he thought of it, the less hopeless it appeared to be. His unrecognisable and nameless antagonists had temporarily withdrawn from the fight, whether to consolidate their forces and plan some new form of attack, or because they had received a very salutary lesson, he could not say. Also it did not worry him over much. His ideas were centred mainly on Mr. c.u.mshaw. True, that gentleman had disappeared over the horizon with every mark of unseemly haste, and already he must be well advanced on whatever road he was taking. Not so very far away the car awaited Bryce, and he was sure that, once he reached it, it would be merely a matter of a day or so until he rediscovered Mr. c.u.mshaw. He repeated the verb. "Re-discovered" struck a distinctive note. One could not convey the same meaning with any form of the verb "to overtake;" Mr.

c.u.mshaw had disappeared, not simply gone on ahead. He chuckled softly at his own quaint conceit, and at that his spirits began to rise again.

Feeling now fully rested, he rose to his feet and swung out on the track with that long slow stride which was all that remained of his athletic form of the old New Guinea days. Of late years he had walked, when he had walked at all, with the quick nervous step of the city-bred man, and it heartened him immensely to know that he was recovering without any effort of his volition the old easy pioneer stride.

It is not within the scope of this tale to relate how Mr. Bryce at length reached his car and set out on what he believed to be Abel c.u.mshaw's trail. Suffice it to state that he reached his machine without any untoward incident, the two gentlemen who had so rudely disturbed the serenity of his nature having seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. Once he pa.s.sed a drover and elicited from him that a man answering c.u.mshaw's description had pa.s.sed him on the road the previous morning. Evidently then the missing man was keeping away from the towns, taking instead a trail that would inevitably lead him further into the bush. He was rather pleased at this. Abel c.u.mshaw in the city would be as hard to find as the proverbial needle in a bundle of hay, but in the bush it would be much easier to locate him, Bryce considered. So he drove the car along at a low speed, keeping all the time a watchful eye out for any signs of the truant. As he progressed he was surprised and not a little pleased to find that his New Guinea woodcraft was coming back to him by degrees. The joy of the chase was his, and he experienced again the same keen and primitive emotions that had thrilled him in the days when the elder Carstairs and he had trodden the unexplored wilds of Papua.

He came upon c.u.mshaw very suddenly. The car was creeping through the trees at a snail's pace--there was no clearly defined track in that part of the bush, and Bryce was taking no unnecessary risks--when he caught sight of a figure that might or might not be the missing Mr. c.u.mshaw. He stopped the car at once and descended to the ground. As has already been noted earlier in these memoirs, Mr. Bryce, when occasion required it, for all his huge bulk, could move as agilely and noiselessly as that pre-eminently silent animal, the domestic cat. He had been so keyed up by the emotional stresses of the last few days that he threw himself into the adventure with all the zest of a schoolboy just being introduced into romance. The man was dodging through the trees a hundred yards or so ahead, and there was something so furtive about his movements that Bryce approached with more than his usual caution.

The man halted and glanced swiftly around. Bryce flattened himself against a handy tree, and fervently hoped that the shadow was thick enough to conceal him. The other patently had no idea that he was being followed, for, apparently quite satisfied with his hasty scrutiny, he dropped on his knees and commenced sc.r.a.ping the earth away with the point of a knife that had appeared in his hand with the magical suddenness of a conjuring trick. As the man worked away Bryce peeped out from his hiding-place and saw then that it was indeed c.u.mshaw. He watched fascinated. His heart was thumping away like the piston of a steam-engine, and some queer unnamed instinct told him that the chase was drawing to a close. c.u.mshaw was digging up something of vital importance; it might be the treasure itself or perhaps the key to it.

But why should c.u.mshaw have gone so stealthily to work unless--? "Unless he is going to cut me out of it," said Bryce to himself.

Abruptly the other straightened up and hugged something to his breast.

It was covered with black loam, and at the distance Bryce could not tell what it was. He slipped stealthily from tree to tree until he had wormed his noiseless way right up to c.u.mshaw. Then, seeing that he had his man cut off should he attempt to escape, he stepped out into the open and laid a kindly hand on the fugitive's shoulder. c.u.mshaw turned in a flash, and, in the excitement of the moment, the earth-covered object slipped out of his hands and fell on the gra.s.s at his feet.

"Where have you been all this time?" Bryce asked jovially.

c.u.mshaw stared at him in a puzzled way. His face at first had shown all the symptoms of fear, but the moment Bryce spoke they faded out, to be replaced by a very obvious air of relief. Yet there was nothing of recognition in the man's eyes; they were full of a great blank wonder, like the eyes of a child who takes its first look at the teeming life beyond its doors. His forehead crinkled up as if he were trying to recall something that had slipped his memory.

"Who are you?" he said at length. "I ... I don't think I know you," and he brushed his forehead with a weak, ineffective gesture of the hand. It was then that Bryce noticed the matted, blood-stained condition of his hair and the big purple bruise that disfigured his temple. His quick mind guessed at what had happened, though, erroneously enough, he concluded that c.u.mshaw had received the blows in an encounter with the men who had been the original cause of the man's flight.

"You'd better come with me, c.u.mshaw," he said in the same soothing tone that he would have applied to a tired child.

"I'm going home," said c.u.mshaw with weak stubbornness. "I don't want to go with you."

"I'll take you home," said Bryce.

That he decided was the only thing he could do. c.u.mshaw was in no fit state to continue the search for his lost valley, and Bryce realised that it would not be safe to leave him uncared for. If he went home with c.u.mshaw he would be throwing his pursuers off the track. That would help him considerably. He had no fear that they would discover the valley during his absence; their attack on him showed that they had come to the end of their resources, and fancied that their only hope of touching any of the spoils was by forcing the secret out of Bryce. Of course it was quite on the cards that they would follow the car, but it was just as likely that they would make no definite move until they had solved the meaning of his change of plans.

c.u.mshaw was still standing like a man in a dream. Bryce placed his hand on the man's arm.

"Come along with me," he said. "I'll see that you get safely home."

He bent down quickly and picked up the loam-encrusted object that c.u.mshaw had dropped in the first moment of the encounter, c.u.mshaw followed his movements with troubled eyes, but did not interfere in any way. Bryce could see that the thing was a bit of wood, and on one piece of it, where the earth had been sc.r.a.ped off, there were letters scratched. He thrust it into his pocket, meaning to examine it more closely at his leisure.