Their own harried breathing was magnified to a loud snorting, their own stumbling steps dinned in their ears, but nothing could drown out that nagging, vindictive underscoring murmuring in their wake, now close, now hanging back a little: pad, pad, pad.
They were goaded onward by it, in knee-twisting, groping flurries of haste that ebbed and flowed from them like valvular spurts, carrying them along the rock-rimmed conduit. They hurt and bruised themselves against the walls, for they couldn’t run true, and when there were shifts in direction, and there were many, they could only find them out by trial and error. Not once but several times she stumbled and went down, and he was only saved from going down on top of her by the fact that they weren’t going very fast any more, they couldn’t. She would have lain here spent, but he drew her weakly up again each time and supported her until her own legs could find themselves once more, and that remorseless pad, pad, pad, looming on them in these brief halts, drove her on again like a flash.
Their ears were no good to them any more. The blood was singing in them too much for them to be able to tell whether they were losing ground or maintaining the same distance they had started out with. They could only be sure they hadn’t gained on their pursuers, for coming still upright on two legs could have gone much slower than the reeling amble to which they were now reduced.
They came to the place where the water was. It gave a faint tinkling warning just before they reached it, and he dreaded its arrival, parched and expiring of thirst as they both were, for he was afraid they wouldn’t be able to tear themselves away from it again, wouldn’t have the strength of mind.
She went down on all fours and pressed her face flat against the rock, there where the water traced its way down, and he stood over her slantwise and let it find his own agonized face higher up. He felt as though he’d gone without water all his life. He felt as though death would be a cheap exchange for standing here a stolen moment longer.
Pad, pad, pad swelled out at them, like a trip-hammering of doom, every instant nearer, surer.
He took her by the back of the neck and pried her stubborn head away. “Don’t swallow any more, hold the rest of it in your mouth,” he warned her.
She struggled to get back to it for a moment, then her reason reasserted itself and she turned docilely away.
They went on again, the pad, pad, pad closer and clearer. Then it desisted for a moment, in the place where the water was. But faint and far back, even when it had stopped, a ghostly repetition of it could still be heard. The pursuit was multiple, but one member of it had far outdistanced the others. And the quickness with which he reached the water, following their own departure, showed how sickeningly close he was. Almost at their very heels.
A moment only this foremost tread relented, then at struck out again. Swifter, fresher, for he had needed less restoring.
They could even hear his breathing now, hoarse and rasping, welling through the tunnel after them.
Suddenly she made an abrupt turnabout, and they collided with one another, and both of them nearly fell together.
“It’s stopped, it’s ended,” she gasped. “I can’t find the way.”
He struck out with his hands, all over, up and down, and felt only rock. It blocked them off, sealed them up.
And then a little paleness revealed itself at the sides. A shadow of a gleam. A thread of grayness unraveling in the dark.
“The slab!” he choked.
He rammed his shoulder into it, and it wouldn’t move. The gleam brightened a little, like a flame that is blown on, then dimmed again.
The pad, pad, pad was rising now to a crescendo of vengeful triumph.
He ran back a little, and turned, and rushed at the impediment, and it wavered, the foursquare gleam around its edges brightened further, only to contract again. It wouldn’t go down, it wouldn’t let them out. Safety lay so near and yet so far. Life was six or eight inches away from them.
He was crazed for a minute, clawed at it futilely with his bare hands. She had collapsed into a whimpering huddle somewhere in the dark at his feet.
Then suddenly he desisted and, as if stung to a berserk fury, goaded to self-destruction, turned and rushed headlong toward the oncoming pad, pad, pad.
He dropped to the ground, flattened himself crosswise on the floor of the tunnel, and lay there still.
It came on. He could feel the very rock floor under him vibrate to its approach. Pad, pad, pad, pad...
And then the last one never sounded, never fell.
Instead a bare foot gouged into his side, delivering an inadvertent kick that rocked him from head to toe. A body off balance, flying through the air in an arc, came crashing down, partly over but mostly beyond him. Only its futilely scissoring legs landed actually on top of him.
The thundering crash of the fall thudded through the vault. The savage must have been stunned by the impact; a reflex twitching was all the movement he made for a minute. And by that time Jones had reared up and was at his throat.
Then he found that he hadn’t the strength of grip necessary to squeeze out life quickly. This was no time to give quarter or to fight up to a mere point of mastery, then desist. This was kill or be killed.
He shifted his grasp and caught the two coils of long, coarse Indian hair in a double-fisted grip, one at each side of the head. The heavy thud resumed again, but this time it wasn’t feet running along the rock-floored passageway. He could feel the skull shatter and disintegrate somewhere in between the levers of his grasp.
He left him brained, and jumped up and ran back to her. Still others were coming, but they were still some distance off. A little time, a minute or two, had been gained.
“Push hard against it, with all your strength, as I go into it.”
He made a sort of bumper of his interlocked arms, and careened into it. The light brightened almost intolerably this time, like flashlight-powder sizzling all around the rim of the slab. There was a moment while it stayed ajar against all edicts of gravity, and there was nothing but brightness and open space in front of their dazzling eyes.
They were back in the world again.
Pad, pad, pad was coming up behind them like a drumbeat. He pulled her through after him, scarcely able to see in the sudden new incandescence beating around them. The sun was low but it was still daylight.
They ran through the meandering gully, the cleft of Mitty’s former longings and reveries. Its earthen ramparts were all that kept them on course for a while until their eyes became accustomed again to the light.
Then when they did, the vista of the downslope cohered before them like a slowly forming pattern on a photographic plate soaking in solution, strengthening, darkening, moment by moment. There was the little spring far below them, and standing motionless at it, two men on horses. Carbines were slung at their shoulders, the sun winking back from their barrels. Perhaps they were drawn this far up by their duties of policing the outer side of the slope, or perhaps they had been detailed to search for someone who had disappeared.
He threw up his arm and swung it hysterically at them, even as he kept running, tumbling, scraping down toward them, sending jets of dust and ropes of little stones down ahead of him.
The men saw them; there was a sudden rigid locking of posture that told that unmistakably. They both became taller on their saddles. Their mounts’ necks, reined up from the pool, remained suspended. They stared up at them, motionless, as if unable to make out where they’d come from.
He looked back, and one of the savages had come out into full sight past the mouth of the chasm. The sun was low in the west and it caught him squarely, in all his flaming hate and gaudy barbarism. Ruddy copper body, pulsing at the ribs with its long run; kilt about the waist; knife to hip; tuft of brilliant scarlet hummingbird feathers sprouting at his crown. A blue shadow, such as all men cast, was leaning awry behind him on the slope. His arm was back, balancing a poised javelin.