Buffalo Bill's death message or, In the face of doom
worse off than here, if we can get up there, and we may discover
something.”
“Ve iss all dead togedder!” groaned Henselman, but when he saw the other
members of the party begin to tear up the net for the purpose of
twisting its cords into ropes, the hope of escape caused him to lend a
hand.
Though the net was large, and therefore presented abundant material, the
work of cutting out the cords in such a manner that they could be used
was not easy. But the ropes, hand-twisted, grew in size and length,
until the scout declared they had enough for their experiment.
Out of the ropes he fashioned a long lasso, and, standing in the center
of the room, he hurled its noose at a supporting roof beam which
projected just beneath the hole.
At the second cast he caught the beam with the loop, and when he had
drawn it fast he ascended the rope, hand over hand, with all the
dexterity of a trained acrobat. It did not take the skillful scout long
to reach the opening. There, standing on the end of the beam, with his
head thrust through the opening, he looked about.
“There is a gallery here, which leads to the dome,” he announced. “In
the other direction it ends at a stone door, which I suppose is
impassable. Just stay here while I look about a minute.”
He crawled through the opening, and placed his feet in the wide gallery.
Passing upward, he found that the gallery became a winding stairway
which led into the dome. This was a round cupola, with windows
overlooking the valley and the adjacent hills. He was astonished by the
view to be had from those windows. Far off he could even see the
conelike hill of magnetic iron which had affected the compasses, and
nearer at hand, though quite distant, the white, flat stone standing
upright like the wall of a tent, on which that message of the heliograph
had been flashed. But there was apparently no way of escape from the
dome except by a suicidal leap from one of the windows.
Below him he saw masses of Indians moving about in apparent excitement.
“Even if we could get down from here, we should be right in the midst of
them,” was his thought.
When he had retraced his steps to the stairway and gallery and had gone
downward and in the other direction to the stone door, which he could
not even shake, he returned to the opening in the roof of the room. He
crawled through to the beam, and rested on it, while he spoke to those
below, telling them of his discoveries.
“I don’t know that we’ll be better off up here, or in the dome, than
down there,” he admitted, “but we’ll at least have a better outlook, and
that’s something.”
Lawler grasped the rope and began to climb it.
The scout permitted him to ascend to a seat beside him on the beam.
“I think now, lieutenant,” he said, “that it would be well to make a
sort of harness, or chair, for the young lady, in that end of the rope,
after which we will hoist her up to this point. Perhaps before she
ascends it will be best for you to come up here and help us to lift
her.”
“But I can climb,” she protested.
Nevertheless, Lieutenant Butler, assisted by Bounderby, knotted together
a sort of combined chair and harness, in which she could sit, and which
would support her. They saw she was too weak from her trying experience
to attempt to climb the rope, and they had no thought of permitting her
to try it.
Having done this, Lieutenant Butler climbed up to the perch occupied by
the scout and Lawler, and all three men then lent a hand in hoisting her
up to that point.
It was a hard pull, for the footing was not good, but she aided herself
by pushing with her feet against the wall.
Henselman came next, in the chair she had used, assisting himself all he
could, but groaning prodigiously; and he was followed by Professor
Bounderby.
When they stepped out into the gallery, they took the rope with them;
they had also brought the remnants of the big net, thinking they might
be of further use.
Professor Bounderby was delighted with the view from the dome, and at
once began to set down his impressions in his notebook. The others began
to discuss possible ways of escape.
As he looked out at the white, tentlike rock in the distance, Buffalo
Bill had a happy thought.
“Lieutenant Butler,” he said, “it would be possible, I suppose, for you
to flash a message from here to the face of that rock. Or is the sun not
just right for it now?”
The face of the lieutenant lighted up at the suggestion.
“We can do it,” he said. “Lucky they didn’t take our things from us. Of
course if no one is near the rock the message would be useless, but we
can try it.”
For the next few minutes Butler and Lawler busied themselves with
getting the heliograph together and in working order, adjusting its
mirrors to the sun, and training them on that white wall.
“Major Fernald is out there somewhere,” said Butler, his face flushed
with hope. “The chances are not great, but he may happen to be where he
will see the flashes. I’m sure we can strike that rock with them. The
position of the sun in this window is all right for it, and the
heliograph is in working order now.”
Then he sighted the machine at the rock, and soon began to flash his
message for help.
“The only thing to do,” he said, “is to keep it up—repeat it over and
over. If they’re not there, or near there now, they may come there some
time this afternoon. And we can try it again to-morrow; keep it going
all day. This is a great idea, Cody. We can hold those bloody Aztecs
back with our revolvers, and stay in here a week, even if we haven’t any
food, and perhaps before we’re actually starved out we can reach the
major.”
He worked with enthusiasm.
Buffalo Bill trained his binoculars on the white rock, and could see the
flashes playing and flitting on its surface.
Hour after hour Lieutenant Butler continued his work, and when he tired,
young Lawler took it up, so that a succession of messages was being sent
continuously.
Over and over they said the same thing:
“We are prisoners in the temple in the valley, which you can
see from the cliff walls. We are doomed. Miss Fernald is
with us. Come to our help.
“BUTLER.”
While this was going on, the Aztecs were not idle. They discovered soon
that the prisoners had escaped from their prison room and were in the
temple dome. They crowded the gallery and filled the stairway, before
the scout and those with him knew that the escape from the prison room
had been found out.
Cody saw that the stone door was still closed, though doubtless the
Aztecs had come through it.
“We’ll charge the rascals by and by, if we have to, and clear them out
of there,” he said, “and perhaps when we do we may be able to get
through that door. It might let us reach the ground.”
“Bud voult dot hellup us?” said the despairing Henselman. “Ve coult pe
kilt yoost so soon as dey seen us. Id iss no use. Ve iss all dead men
togedder.”
The talk of reaching Major Fernald with the heliograph had aroused
Henselman’s hope a bit at first, but that hope died utterly as the hours
passed without result. He saw the sun sinking, and knew that night was
coming when no more messages could be sent.
“Unt maype to-morrow vill be dark like id vas yisterday,” he urged, “unt
ve can’t sent no messaches at all. Id iss no use.”
Bounderby rebuked him at intervals, even though the professor’s courage
had weakened until it was little better than that of the German.
“Henselman, I am heartily ashamed of you!” the professor would declare.
“You are in no more danger than the rest of us. Think what fine material
this will make for my lecture, when we escape from here.”
As the sun sank, and Butler declared no more messages could be sent that
afternoon, a strange commotion was seen near the wall of the valley.
Indians on the highway there were seen running toward the temple. As
they came nearer and met others, these began to run, too. Then behind
them, in the dust of the highway, the forms of white men were seen, and
reports of rifles sounded, the smoke puffs from the guns leaping now and
then out of the dust cloud.
Buffalo Bill swung his hat and cheered.
“Help at last!” he said. “Lieutenant Butler, your messages have been
seen. If I’m not mistaken, there come Major Fernald and his gallant
followers. We are saved!”
Henselman leaped to his feet. “Vere?” he said, then he, too, swung his
hat, roaring: “Ve are safed! Ve are safed!”
Miss Fernald leaned from a window of the dome, looking with moist eyes
across the valley.
“My brother!” she whispered. “My brave brother!”
In a little while the forms of the men who were driving the Indians
before them could be seen more plainly. They were coming up at a swift
pace, on foot, and were shooting at every Indian they saw, thus carrying
consternation into the midst of the Aztecs, who saw their friends
falling slain by those mysterious fire sticks.
The Aztecs near the temple were thrown into a panic, as the white men
charged them, shooting at them, and tumbling many of them down, wounded
or dead.
The Indians who had crowded the gallery and stairway leading to the dome
vanished through that stone door; but before Buffalo Bill and his
companions could get down to it the door was closed and immovable.
Though they hammered on it, they could not shake it; nor could they find
any means of opening it. It seemed set in a groove, in which it no doubt
slid, but their utmost exertions would not move it.
Major Fernald had more than twenty men with him, and they conducted
themselves like heroes.
In spite of the tremendous force which they might have expected would
oppose them, they had climbed the cliff walls into the valley, and then
had charged with sublime heroism upon the Indians between them and the
shining temple mentioned in the heliograph message which they had
fortunately seen flashing on that tentlike stone so far away.
Right into the temple they came, firing at every Indian seen; and so
great was the scare they created, and so terrible the fear in which the
Indians stood of those death-dealing fire sticks, that the Aztecs fled
pellmell, scattering in every direction.
Some of the priests opposed them at the altar and before the sacrificial
stone, only to fall dead there. But now that they were in the temple
itself, they did not see the prisoners. They discovered at length,
however, that they were in the high dome, and they found a way to get up
to it.
They arrived at the door which shut the prisoners in, but from that side
the door was not difficult to move; they had but to throw their weight
against it, and it slipped along in its groove, opening for the
prisoners a way to freedom.
Emily Fernald fell with hysterical sobbing into the arms of her brother.
Not many words were spent in telling how Major Fernald’s party, after
long searching, had returned toward the point from which they had
started, and while so doing had passed near the tentlike rock, and there
had seen the heliograph messages; time was too precious to be wasted in
much talk.
The prisoners and their rescuers hurried down from the dome, and made
haste to get out of the valley of Zataclin while the fright of the
Aztecs lasted.
They gained the hills beyond the cuplike valley, and by the stars found
a northerly course, which they hoped would take them out of danger
before morning.
When morning arrived the sky was again gray and cloudy and the compasses
refused to perform their mission. But under the expert guidance of
Buffalo Bill the party held as true a course as possible, so that on the
second day they were far from the valley of the mysterious Aztecs of
Zataclin. It was so bewildering a region that they did not care to seek