Читать книгу Death's Cold Arms - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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MARY DEAN saw the red flag sweep down, signaling that everyone was well clear of danger from the blast.

"All clear," she said. "Let it go."

With a single heave of his muscular shoulders Paul Faston thrust the plunger down into the little black box from which long wires trailed away. Muffled thunder pounded across the desert plateau. A tiny smoke-puff, grotesquely out of proportion to the sound, spurted out of the summit of the high cliff that from time immemorial had walled the far side of the alkali flat. The towering grey rock-face leaned away from the mesa with slow majesty. Then it arced down, faster and faster, crashed into a myriad fragments.

A shrill, piercing wail sliced through the deafening detonation of that gigantic collapse. It jerked Mary's startled look to the Indian powder-monkey who had been crouched alongside Paul. The overalled aborigine's coppery countenance was a writhing mask of abysmal terror. His arm, outflung and rigid, stabbed pointing fingers at the dust-cloud billowing above the fallen precipice.

The cloud was a vast, demoniac face, blotting out the mesa, the sky itself, with swirling darkness. Staring at it, a sudden freezing panic ran quivering through the girl's veins.

Wanoo's gibbering scream formed words.

"He wake!" the Indian squealed. "Nahmeto wake again. Thunder- sticks hurt Nahmeto and he wake to punish us. We all dead. When Nahmeto come in night we all dead!"

Somehow Mary's fingers were digging into Wanoo's shoulder. "Nahmeto! Who—who is...?"

"Nahmeto evil spirit of my people. Half man, half rock. When dark of moon come steal people and eat, make himself all man. Nahmeto go to sleep in mesa when paleface comes, now wake up again."

For a terrible instant the frenzy of ancestral fear in the Ute's voice swept Mary into his terror. An icy shudder ran through her, and then Paul's strong arm caught her away from the gibbering Indian.

"He's full of tequila, hon. Forget him."

Her lover's vibrant strength throbbed against her trembling, slim form, and the fear seeped away. The cloud was no longer a sinister face. It was just swirling dust that thinned rapidly to let her see hazily the knot of laborers far to one side and the familiar low roofs of the mining camp.

"How was that for placing shots?" Paul's deep-chested voice ran on. "Look! The cliff front's cut off as clean as if I'd sliced it with a big knife, and there's the vein of silver ore your dad insisted must be there."

"It is. Paul, it's there!" Mary saw the dark splotch to which he pointed. "Dad's made his big strike at last. The strike he's hunted for all his life. Now he—"

"Hell!" the exclamation jolted across her jubilance. "I'll be—"

"What—?"

"I'm not so good after all. See that spur sticking out like a sore thumb, twenty feet up? That should have come away with the rest. I'll swear I put a shot right there. The fulminate must have? Good Lord!"

Paul jerked away from her, abruptly, was running toward the blasted cliff-face, toward a khaki-clad figure clambering the riven, white-glaring granite. Mary was running too, her high- pitched cry flinging out before her, joining itself to Paul's almost incoherent shout.

"Ned! Don't! Stop, Ned. Stop!"

Ned Thiel knew as well as they the peril toward which he climbed, the peril lurking behind that outjut of weathered stone. Dynamite is tricky stuff and often a dud shot goes off minutes after it should by all rights be dead and harmless. But he was climbing swiftly, unheeding their shouts of warning. Ned was like that, swaggering, reckless. That was what had finally decided her against him, what had finally made her choose Paul instead of him in their fierce rivalry for her. Only minutes ago she had told Paul—

"Ned," Paul shouted again. "Ned, you ass!"

Thiel didn't hear him, or else didn't want to hear him. He got a brown hand on the rocky protuberance, another, swung free from the cliff face. For a moment his sturdy frame hung, penduluming, and then he had chinned up, was hidden...

Mary caught up with Paul. "Why is he doing that?" she panted.

A dark film of wrath underlay the anxiety in the hard-rock man's broad-boned face. "He's trying to show me up," he gritted. "Beating me to the dud to prove I didn't make the right connections."

A spurt of yellow flame from above checked him, and the flat pound of a dynamite blast. Paul's shoulder thrust Mary backwards. The rock was falling was bounding down the cliff. A piece split off from it, smaller, blacker, hit some vagrant inequality and took its own errant course.

It thudded to the ground, at Mary's feet. It wasn't stone. It was human flesh, charred, battered, hideous. The arms, the legs, were sheared from shredded stumps by some gruesome whimsy of the explosion. Only the torso was left, and the head, rolling in macabre simulation of life.

Blackened eyelids flickered open. Living orbs stared up at Paul, at Mary. Eyes incredibly still alive flared with unutterable anguish—and with unutterable hate. Out of the flame-crisped horror that was once Ned Thiel's face a tortured soul glared at them, cursing them.

Dark vertigo swirled about Mary Dean.

"Don't look!" Paul's voice gibbered out of the thud of many running footfalls. "Don't look, Mary..."

"Nahmeto!" Wanoo's guttural accents jabbered out of the whirling nausea. "Nahmeto quick to punish..."

Merciful oblivion blotted out the voices, blotted out everything...