knew how the youth felt, and wisely said nothing.
“The road is right above us here,” Dave spoke again. “Look, that’s where we scrambled down when we first saw the lookout going up the hill yonder.”
“Yes,” Ben said, looking up. “But the road bends sharp left a little ways on, and goes downgrade until it picks up the main stem just out of Raven Rock. I guess you’ve been over—hello!”
At the edge of the arroyo, high above their heads, a bow-legged, wizened little figure was suddenly silhouetted. One hand was raised in command.
Dave’s jaw dropped. It seemed to him as if some ancient gnome had burst out of his mountain lair to take sides in the hunt.
“Hold on, there!” came a shout, in a high, cracked voice. “Hold on!”
CHAPTER XXI
Swallowed Up
Doris had started on her daring raid with full confidence that she would succeed, and came within arm’s length of doing so.
A broad, flat juniper bush was between her and the goal of her adventure.
“That gives just so much more concealment,” she told herself.
Doris paused a moment to make sure that no one was looking in her direction. A juniper bush suddenly sprouting an arm and rifling a coat would be too much of a surprise, even in this surprising country.
Pulling herself to her knees Doris reached forward through the sharp needles of the evergreen shrub. Just then she heard the clatter of hoofs and the crash of dislodged stones rolling down the slope behind her.
Her fingers closed upon Moon’s coat, and in her haste to drag the garment toward her Doris lost her balance and fell forward.
To her amazement the bush did not check her fall and the earth seemed to dissolve into nothingness below her! Forward and downward she plunged into darkness, to land with a thump that momentarily stunned her.
“I feel the way Alice in Wonderland did when she fell down the rabbit’s hole,” was the droll thought that popped into her mind as soon as she recovered her wits.
Sounds of pursuit, however, and shouts and yells from men immediately chased all whimsy from her mind. Doris looked around her, wonderingly.
“Why, that bush must have concealed the entrance to this cave,” she said to herself. “And I’m not the first one to have been in here, either.” What little of the afternoon sunlight penetrated the opening over her head showed the dim outlines of many kegs and boxes.
“Was I seen?” Doris wondered. “How shall I get out of here if no one noticed me?”
She rose to her feet. The hole through which she had fallen was not more than two feet over her head. An empty box, evidently used for the same purpose by the makers of the underground chamber, served as a stepping stone. Cautiously Doris peered over the edge.
The first thing she saw was a large boulder that was obviously used to seal as well as conceal the opening to the cave by the simple expedient of rolling it across the hole. The edges of this, Doris noted, were concreted to bear the weight of the rock. By standing on tiptoe and twisting her neck a little, Doris could see past the rock and into the bowl-like valley.
She saw the front wheels of an automobile and a corner of the lumber pile near the well rigging, but no sign of human life. Then suddenly a man dashed across her line of vision, but whether he was in pursuit of something or being pursued she could not tell.
“Now to get out,” she told herself.
By gripping the edges of the opening and using her elbows as braces Doris managed to get head and shoulders above ground.
“No use, we can’t catch him!”
That sentence, spoken in a gruff voice, sent Doris swiftly back into the shelter of the hole.
“Let’s sit here and see what Moon wants us to do,” another voice said.
“The stowaway—Miss Bedelle’s brother!” Doris whispered to herself. “I know that voice!”
“If Moon’s half the wizard he thinks he is, we ought to strike oil in a couple of hundred feet,” the first speaker said.
“That ought to make us all rich,” came from the stowaway.
“Shucks, Charlie, the money for the oil isn’t a tenth of the fortune,” the other said. “Selling stock to widows—there’s the real profits!”
“Well, he won’t sell much without my help,” young Bedelle boasted.
“Don’t you say that where he can hear you,” the boy’s companion warned. “He has a way of putting those who double-cross him where they won’t bother him no more.”
“Getting rid of me wouldn’t help him any,” the braggart continued. “My sister just about runs public opinion around here. If I coax her into giving me half the ranch with the promise I’ll stay here and farm it, and then turn it over to you birds, why, everybody’ll think she sold out to Moon and he can do what he wants in Raven Rock. Otherwise he has to sneak around like he’s doing now.”
“Don’t forget we’ve the deeds to this land—and nobody can prove ownership,” the bass-voiced one went on. “When the county can be coaxed to put it up for forced sale this is all the ground Moon will need—and you may need less.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that one little plot of ground is all a dead man needs,” the crook’s accomplice said meaningly.
Doris, crouched in the darkness below, felt her blood run cold at the sinister tone in the man’s voice.
“No wonder they wanted to get the deeds,” she thought. “Why, the oil is just under the surface, and they can get at it without any trouble at all. Then they intend to sell stock for ten times what the oil wells are worth!”
The conversation outside went on steadily. Young Bedelle was boasting more and more recklessly.
“Say, I’m a pretty tough customer myself,” he bragged. “I beat my way out here from Boston after putting over a big deal, but the fellows who were working with me doublecrossed me and took all the money. And say, I rode out part way in my sister’s own airplane, and she doesn’t know it yet.”
Doris smiled to herself.
“You may be mistaken about that, Charlie,” she thought. “Just as your vicious companion is mistaken about Moon having the deeds.”
Her hand stole to the hip pockets of her riding breeches, where the papers she had taken from Moon’s pockets crackled assuringly.
“There’s just one more thing to worry me,” Doris said to herself. “When Henry Moon doesn’t find his coat he is going to hunt for it, and when he locates it down here, where will Doris Force be?”
That thought made her decide to forego further eavesdropping and to look around the cave for a hiding place or possible
