Doris made no reply.
“I am an informal sort of fellow,” Moon continued mockingly. “I sure appreciate it when beautiful red-headed ladies come catlling informally.”
Doris pressed her clenched hands against her pounding heart.
“I’m sorry my quarters are so crude,” Moon said. “However,—”
He stooped, and from some recess Doris had not discovered, picked up an electric lantern which he set upon a keg.
“I heard you singing,” Moon went on. “Won’t you oblige me with a selection? Say that old war-song, for instance, ‘Where do we go from here?’”
“I think ‘The Prisoner’s Song’ would be more appropriate,” Doris returned. “For me, now— and for you later, Mr. Moon!”
“So!” Moon hissed, casting aside his mockery. “So that’s what you think will be the sequel, eh?
“Listen here, you little snip, give me back those papers you took from my coat!”
“You mean the papers you had your accomplices steal from my uncle!” Doris retorted in icy, level tones.
“I mean the papers you stole from my coat, and not anything else,” Henry Moon snarled. “Don’t be a fool. I can take them by force if I must.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Doris replied, desperately fencing for time. “I saw you and your workmen drilling down here and I came down to investigate. This property belongs to my relatives, so you have no business to be drilling or even walking on it. Then I fell into this hole, and someone rolled a rock over the top.”
Moon threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“I spied you behind the bush,” he said. “I don’t know how you got there, but I noticed you when your horse bolted down the hill. I saw you fall, and I know just how long you have been here. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Doris knew she was in a hopeless predicament. Moon saw her lip tremble, and gloated at the girl’s mental torture.
“Well, you are safe here,” he said. “If I made you give me the papers and let you loose you would make a lot of trouble for me. I think I’ll just let you spend the night here, and tomorrow I’ll have my pals help me decide what we can do with you.” Doris regained her self-control instantly.
“I would rather be alone,” she retorted.
“We may kill you,” Moon mus’ed. “Then again we may not, and in that case you may wish we had been merciful with a bullet or two.”
He picked up the lantern and hooked it to his belt.
“If you will pardon me, then, I will rejoin my comrades who are waiting for me at the well,” he said mockingly. “I gave them an excuse for returning here but it grows late and I fear me they wish to wash up before supper. Good-night—and pleasant dreams.”
He leaped to the box and drew himself out of the hole. The rock thudded back into place and again Doris was alone in total darkness.
Henry Moon had no intention of leaving the scene, however. He was a man so depraved in character, so cruel and heartless, that it gave him delight to torture his captive.
His two closest cronies, the scar-nosed half-breed who answered to the name of Wolf, and Tracey, the strongest of the trio, would wait patiently in their parked machine until he returned. Moon was sure of that. The men were his unquestioned tools to whom he had taught strict obedience.
Now he sat on the rock that sealed the cave and brushed off his clothing.
“What shall I do with that red-head?” he asked himself. “If she disappears it will be mighty bad for me, and if I let her go it will be worse.
“I wonder if any of her friends were with her and saw her fall into the cave. If they did they turned and ran like yellow curs. But they seem to be a foolhardy crowd. Those boys were in my room at the hotel, sure enough, but how they got back home before me and the sheriff, I don’t know.”
Furiously the crook denounced the four young folks for bobbing up on the scene of his criminal operations and spoiling his plans. As he schemed to outwit them, it was growing dark among the hills.
“Maybe I had better lure the rest of them down here and settle for them all at once,” he pondered.
A muffled cry that echoed and re-echoed “Doris!” brought him to his feet. It was the cry that Dave had seht up in desperation as he rode with Ben.
While Moon plotted his schemes over her head and Dave called frantically, Doris was engaged in trying to reason some way out of her predicament. As she sat in pitch blackness, a sudden thought struck her. What if she fell asleep, and was surprised by the wicked Moon? She must keep awake!
Groping around in the darkness, she came upon the pile of steel drill rods. She lifted one. It was so heavy it was all she could do to hold it, and she could not swing it very well.
“I couldn’t do much damage with one of these,” she told herself.
More to keep busy than with any thought of using the steel rod, she practised swinging the iron bar, as time passed on.
Suddenly she heard the rock that sealed the opening being moved. Guided by her ears alone, for the inky darkness made her eyes useless, Doris, still holding the heavy rod, took up what she guessed was the most advantageous position to ward off an attack.
CHAPTER XXIV
Moon’s Problem Solved
“Supposing it is Dave who has come to rescue me!” flashed through Doris’s mind as she braced herself to meet an unseen enemy. Over her head the stone had moved far enough to admit light.
“Dave!” Doris called. “Is that you?”
The rock, half rolled away from the entrance to the cave, was stayed by invisible hands.
“Dave!” Doris cried, raising her voice. “Dave! Help—help!”
With a sinister crunch the rock rolled back into place, plunging the captive once more into inky darkness.
Who could have moved it?
The mysterious movement of the rock unnerved Doris, and she sank to the floor, the steel bar clanging from her hands.
“I must not cry,” she told herself, clenching her fists. “Buck up, Doris Force! Don’t you dare give up!”
She bit her trembling lips, and by sheer willpower conquered the purely physical fear that had overcome her.
It was desperately hard to be imprisoned in total darkness, underground, surrounded by explosives, and realizing that her friends must be searching for her or else were in dire trouble from an attempt to rescue her.
Just then the rock overhead grated in its concrete setting again, and before Doris could rise to her feet or grasp her improvised weapon, a man had dropped into the cave.
In
