The Boy Aviators in Nicaragua; or, In League with the Insurgents

And that was the bitter end of their high hopes of escape from the tunnel.

With fresh despair lying heavy on them the boys examined the walls of the shaft to see if there were not some steps cut there or mounting rounds driven by those who must once have used it, but in whatever manner the ancient Toltecs got in and out of their passage from whatever sort of territory lay at the top of the shaft, they had left no trace of it. The walls were as smooth as a sheet of paper.

“Well,” exclaimed Frank, after the examination was concluded, “we have been in some tight places; but I don’t think we were ever in a neater fix than this seems to be.”

“There’s one chance,” cried Harry, “and only one – it’s just possible that there may be people, civilized people – ”

“Or Indians,” put in Billy, “what difference does it make who or what they are – ”

“As I was about to say,” went on Harry, not noticing the half hysterical interruption of the overwrought boy, “it’s just possible that if there is anyone in the neighborhood of the top of this shaft that we might be able to attract their attention by shouting.”

“A good idea, Harry,” replied Frank. It was at once put into execution. The boys shouted at the pitch of their tired voices for a good hour and then desisted from sheer inability to produce another sound. There was no result. Once a bird hopped onto a creeper at the mouth of the shaft and peeped inquisitively down, but that was the only fruit of their efforts. The boys looked blankly at each other. They were three as brave lads as ever stood together facing hardship and adventure, but who shall blame Billy Barnes if tears did well up in his eyes and topple over, and trickle down his cheeks as, his head in his hands, he sank despairingly on the rock floor at the bottom of the shaft?

The bright blue sky above, the cheerful green of the waving creepers and plants that fringed the mouth of their prison all combined to make their disappointment harder to bear. Each boy felt that if death was to come it would be easier almost to face it in the dark tunnel they had left behind them than here, almost within grasp of life and all they held most dear.

“We’d better take an inventory,” remarked the practical Frank at length, “and see just how long we can last out. When we reach the end we’ve got one desperate chance – ”

His listeners looked up from their despairing attitudes inquiringly.

“We can retrace our steps and try to leap the chasm.”

“A twelve foot jump at least,” exclaimed Harry.

“You’ve done better than that at home many times,” rejoined Frank bravely, “and so have I, and so has Billy, I’ll bet.”

“It’s one thing to do a broad jump at school on the flat ground and another to try it over a chasm full of white serpents,” moaned Harry.

The inventory taken, the boys found that they had the following articles on which to sustain life till they were rescued or till death claimed them – the latter seeming the inevitable contingency.

Three canteens of water – minus about a pint each drunk on the journey.

Four packages each of soup tablets and erbe wurst.

A pocketful apiece of pilot bread.

And that was all. To make matters worse the soup tablets needed water to make them edible and although the boys had an aluminum saucepan with them they realized that in a pinch it is more easy to subsist without food than without water. Their supply of water – the chief consideration – was lamentably small for the situation.

“Maybe we could eat the tablets dry and let them dissolve in our mouths,” suggested Billy, “I’m so ravenously hungry that I’ve got to eat something.”

The idea was hailed as a good one and the boys made a meal at about 2.30 that afternoon off dry soup tablets – two apiece – and one-half round each of their precious pilot bread.

“Tastes like soap more than soup to me,” remarked Billy with a wry face, and then suddenly stopped short, the boy had forgotten for a moment that the “soap” might stand between them and starvation. But the soapy qualities of the tablets were not their worst property. The enterprising manufacturers who made them had seasoned them liberally with salt and pepper, also presumably in compressed form, with the result that half an hour after their meal had concluded the boys were seized with furious pangs of thirst.

They held out as long as they could, knowing the importance of husbanding their water supply, but at last their sufferings became so unbearable that Billy seized his canteen with the remark:

“If I am to die I’m not going to deny myself a drink of water;” and drained a quarter of its contents at one gulp almost. Frank and Harry both possessed plenty of self-control, but the sight of Billy’s assuagement of his thirst was more than they could bear, and simultaneously each of them seized his canteen and throwing back his head let the grateful stream trickle down their parched throats.

“I could hear it sizzle,” exclaimed Harry, putting his canteen aside with a sigh of satisfaction.

That night the boys bravely fought off all temptation to touch any more of their precious water, but when the sun got up and the parching heat of the day penetrated even into the shaft they could bear it no longer. They took their canteens and drank and when they set them down from their lips they contained only a few drops each. As for food they still had some left, but they scarcely dared to eat it fearing to increase the maddening torture of thirst. As the day wore on they sat round the bottom of the shaft in a sort of hopeless apathy.

Their tongues were swollen till they could hardly speak, their eyes were caked with dust and red-rimmed, their lips blackened and parched by their sufferings. They were indeed a different looking group to the trim Chester Exploration Expedition that had set out so light-heartedly the day before. From time to time they fell into a sleep of sheer exhaustion from which they awakened unrefreshed. Strange visions of cool flashing brooks, green orchards and crystal lakes shot through their minds. The first stages of the delirium that precedes death by hunger and thirst were upon them and they realized it. Long before night came and the coolness relieved their sufferings to a slight extent they had emptied the last drops of water in their canteens. They had even resorted to the expedient of staggering back along the tunnel, to where the walls began to grow damp, and licking off the grateful moisture with their tongues. Infinitesimal as the relief was, still it furnished some alleviation of their sufferings.

At daybreak the next day, Harry and Billy were comatose. They lay with their eyes closed at the bottom of the shaft uncaring of their fate. This is the merciful anodyne that nature sometimes brings to those she dooms to die in the cruelest way imaginable. Frank alone held out against the deadly torpor he felt creeping over him.

“While there’s life there’s hope,” he kept whispering through his cracked lips, but he knew that in his heart hope had died and there was nothing to wait for but death.

An idea suddenly struck him. Perhaps some day, long after they were dead, somebody would stumble on them. He would leave a record of their names and how they met their fate. Feverishly, with half palsied hands, he searched through his pockets for a pencil and a scrap of paper. He drew out a handful of odds and ends from his pocket, and sorted through them for a stub of pencil. As he did so his waterproof matchbox fell from the collection and rolled slowly to his feet. He gazed at it stupidly. The idea flashed into his mind, that they would give a lot of fire now for water and here was the means of fire so carefully protected against the element that would give them life. He laughed mirthlessly, but suddenly staggered to his feet, a last hope animating him —

“Fire!”

Across the boy’s reeling brain there shot an idea, as he stared at the matchbox.

If a column of smoke were seen from the shaft mouth it might bring aid. What a fool he was not to have thought of that before. Hastily he tore his shirt into strips and with his blackened, blood-stained hands scraped together some litter that had fallen from the brush above into the shaft.

With trembling hands he lighted it. It caught and blazed brightly up, too brightly in fact. Frank saw that there would have to be more smoke, if his beacon was to be visible. He crawled over to where Harry and Billy lay and ripped their shirts from their backs. The two boys looked at him stupidly, but neither spoke – they were too far gone for that.

As Frank piled the heavy material he had acquired on the blaze, a column of thick blue smoke rolled heavenward out of the shaft mouth. It was their last chance. Nerved by this new kindled hope, Frank gazed at the fire with his rapidly, dimming eyes till it died out into a pile of gray ashes.

Would there be an answer?

How long he sat there Frank never knew. It was long after the ashes had grown cold, however. With a last flicker of consciousness he looked at his watch. Four o’clock. What were they doing at home in New York, what were they thinking at the hacienda? he wondered vaguely.

It was hard to die like this, with the blue sky so near. He gazed up at the shaft mouth as if to take a last farewell of the outer world.

The next minute the exhausted boy leaped to his feet and instantly fell back swooning with a loud cry of joy. Their signal had been seen.

Peering over the top of the shaft, was a wild, brown face fringed with long matted hair and beard, but the eyes were kindly and Frank had read their message of rescue.

CHAPTER XX.

THE LONE CASTAWAY

When Frank opened his eyes he found himself lying on a rough sort of couch, spread with coarse net over clean blankets, in a place that he at first thought was the rocky chamber at the bottom of the shaft. Square windows, cut in the walls, however, through which strips of bright blue sky were visible, and a large sort of altar in the corner on which something that gave forth an appetizing odor, was cooking in an earthen pot, soon disillusionized him. It was a rough dwelling, but after what they had endured, the recollection of the details of which was still dim in the boy leader’s mind, it seemed like a taste of paradise. Outside he could hear the voices of Harry and Billy and another that was not familiar to him.

Throwing off the blanket that had been thrown over him, the boy, – still so weak that his knees seemed to have developed strange sort of hinges and his head reeled, – felt his way along by the rough walls of the dwelling to the door. Harry and Billy, already recovered from their experience, were seated outside the place, which Frank now saw, was dug out in the face of a steep cliff, on a bench also cut out of a kind of soft sandstone. The boys jumped up with a loud “Whoop,” when they saw Frank, and throwing their arms round him, escorted him to the bench and dragged him down by their sides.

“This is our rescuer, Frank;” announced Harry gratefully, indicating a thick-set, sinewy man, burned almost to the color of the cliffs round about by exposure. Frank recognized the hair-fringed face, – almost monkey-like, – with its kindly eyes as the same that he had seen peering over the edge of the shaft as he had looked up, as he thought to take a good-bye to life. The figure of the man who had saved their lives was no less remarkable than his face. He wore rough rawhide sandals and his clothes were shaggy garments, apparently contrived from deerskins. His hat was an ingenious plaited arrangement of manacca palm leaves.

Frank gazed about him in amazement at the place in which he found himself after the first words of gratitude had been exchanged. It was a cliff-rimmed basin possibly two miles in circumference thickly wooded toward one end, but in the portion in which they were seated, bare and sterile as the Treasure Cliff. The steep walls, however, were pierced with numerous openings, some square and some oblong. The honeycomb of ancient cliff dwellings was joined by steep flights of wide steps cut out of the living rock.

After Frank had eaten a good portion of broth out of the earthen pot, he was prepared to hear the story of their rescue and the no less remarkable narrative of their savior. It appeared that late in the afternoon before that man in the deerskin garments had seen Frank’s smoke signal curling up from the mouth of the shaft, which lay about half-a-mile away. He had at once hastened over and gazed down at the first white face he had seen in two long years.

At first he was so startled that he could not believe that the lads lying apparently dead at the bottom of the tunnel were human beings as, for a reason which will be given later, he believed that the other end of the tunnel was impossible of entrance or exit. After the first few minutes of stunned surprise, however, he realized that they were real boys and in sore need of help.

He hastened at once to the burrow that he had selected as his dwelling and secured a long rawhide rope for which he had never imagined he would have any use again. Fastening this to a bush near the top of the shaft, he had hastily secured a bowl of water and some food and after letting these articles down carefully, one at a time, he had lowered himself. After the first application of water to their parched lips the boys recovered their senses and strength rapidly – that is, all but Frank, who for a time they feared was past recovery. Their rescuer, after the boys were sufficiently recovered to be able to stand up and eat some of the stewed, dried deer’s flesh and roasted bread-fruit he had lowered into the shaft, then clambered up on his rawhide rope. The next to reach the surface was Billy with the aid of the man above pulling with all his muscular might.

The rope was then lowered again to Harry who attached it beneath Frank’s armpits, padding it where it came in contact with his body, with their soft felt hats. Harry then clambered up and then all three laid on to the rope and hoisted the senseless Frank to the surface.

“How long ago was this?” asked Frank, who had no idea what day it might be.

“Two days,” was Harry’s astonishing reply.

It was then the turn of the man who had come to their aid in the nick of time to tell his story. His name was Ben Stubbs, and before he became a castaway under as strange circumstances as ever befell a man, he had been a sailor before the mast. He had quit the sea when on the west coast of Guatemala to become a mahogany hunter. From this he had drifted into prospecting for gold in Central America, and about two years before, while sojourning with a band of wandering Nicaragua Indians, had cured the cacique of the tribe of a deadly fever. In return they had confided to him the secret of a legendary basin, high in the mountains worked at one time, so they told it, “by old, old people who were here long before us, when the land was young,” meaning, as Ben realized, the Toltecs.

They offered to escort him to the place up a hidden trail and the ex-seaman, after consulting with a couple of friends in Corinto – as adventurous characters as himself – decided that they would at least test for themselves the truth of this marvelous legend. They traveled several days’ journey from the western coast and at last had reached a deep ravine in the heart of a rugged chain of mountains. Their path had lain up a trail apparently once well worn, but at the time they traversed it so ruined by time that it was hard for the burros, on which they carried their mining implements and camp equipment, to maintain a footing.

The ravine was crossed by a rough bridge formed of the trunk of a single huge tree. The white men got across it in safety, the Indians bidding them farewell at that point, saying that the land beyond was haunted by “spirits of the men that came before them,” and that they could go no further. Beyond the ravine a sheer cliff shot up, but the Indians told the adventurers that by making a day’s march to the north they would find an opening in it. The trail they then followed began at the end of the bridge and was so narrow that at times it was necessary to blindfold even the surefooted mountain burros. On one side lay the huge ravine, on the other the steep cliff. They found the opening, or rather bore, in the cliff exactly as the Indians had told them, and after traversing a short passage had entered the cup-like valley in which the boys and their rescuer now were.

“That was two years ago, shipmates,” sighed Ben Stubbs, “and it seems like fifty. We thought we would all be millionaires afore long. Poor Jack Hudgins, Bill Stowe and me. Well, mates, we found it all as the Injuns had tole us – the shafts an’ all; but we hadn’t got no way of gittin’ down ’em. Howsomever that didn’t worry us none as we found enough bar gold stored up in them houses on the cliff above to make us all rich. We loaded it on our burros after a week’s work, and got all ready for the start back.

“That night there come a bit of an earthquake. Not much as you might say for these lands – just a little tremor – we was so used to ’em we paid no ’tention to ’em. The next day was bright and fair and we hit the trail for the timber bridge and riches and the land of the free. Of course, we meant to cache the gold some place and take it out by degrees as they don’t like Yankees to take any money out of these countries, an’ if they’d caught us they’d have taken the gold an’ jailed us. But it wasn’t ter be. We gets to the end of the trail where the bridge ought to be an’ there weren’t none! The earthquake had dislodged it.

“I guess, then we all went a little mad. There we were trapped. We had to drive the burros off the cliff. There was no room to turn them. Every day for months we used to walk down that trail to where it broke off, an’ there was a drop plumb clear down to nothing as you might say, and holler and holler just like we was all locoed, and I guess we were. You see we figured that maybe them Injuns would come back; but they never did. Well, shipmates, first poor Jack sickened and died; the thought of his wife and kiddies in ’Frisco, as ’ud never know what had become of him, drove him inter a sort of consumption, I guess. Then Bill Stowe got bit by a rattler as he was on his way to the big bell on the top of the east cliff. You see – ”

“The big bell,” exclaimed all the boys, recollecting the mysterious clangor.

“Yes,” replied the castaway, “it’s on the top of the cliff, yander,” he pointed to the east, “I guess the old timers put it there. We’d go up there and watch sometimes out over the valley, an’ when we’d see the camp-fires of rubber men or mahogany hunters or travelers, we’d jus’ naturally ring it to beat thunder. Only the other night I seen a fire down there and I rung and then at last I looked over, but it didn’t do no good – ”

“Why, Ben,” shouted the boys, “that was our fire you saw.”

“Your fire,” repeated Ben, thunderstruck.

“Yes, you scared us almost to death,” went on Frank, “we couldn’t make out what it was.”

“Thought it was a monkey,” put in Billy.

“Well, I guess I’m more monkey than man at that,” sighed Ben Stubbs, “living the way I’ve done, trapping and stalking my food and clothes from the animals in the wood yonder – but, tell me, how did you fellows ever get up here if that was your camp I seen?”

Rapidly they told him of their discovery of the tunnel and it was the ex-sailor’s turn to sit back and look astonished.

“But how did you cross that ’ere hole in the ground?” he demanded, “Long ago, when me and my mates was first stranded on this ’ere island, as you might call it, we tried to get out that way – yes, an’ we tried other tunnels, too, but we couldn’t find no way of doin’ it. If we’d known about the sarpints, I’ll bet you we wouldn’t have tried.”

Frank told him about the chain and about the impossibility of reaching it.

The sailor’s rugged, bearded face took on an interested air.

“You say you left it dangling thar?” he demanded.

“That’s about it,” replied Frank. “We could reach it with a long hook or branch, but how are we to overcome the difficulty of the white serpents? It means death to try to get across that chasm, now that they have been aroused from their long sleep.”

To the boys’ amazement Ben Stubbs winked sententiously. He said not a word, but rising to his feet, led the boys up the cliff to a small cave. In it were several kegs.

“Read that,” commanded the ex-sailor pointing to the stenciled lettering on them. Bending down the boys read:

DYNAMITE – (GIANT POWDER) – KEEPAWAY FROM FIRE OR BOILERSm’f’d byTHE VULCAN EXPLOSIVE COMPANY OFS. F

“I guess if we set off a keg of that stuff in that thar hole it won’t be ’xactly healthy for them thar sarpints, eh?” questioned the castaway.

“The very thing,” excitedly cried Frank, who had begun to fear that in being rescued by Ben Stubbs, they had only got into another trap. The next minute, however, his hope dropped down to zero once more.

“What about the battery and the fuse wires and the fulminate of mercury caps,” he cried, “we can’t set a charge off without them.”

“We could do without ’em, I reckon – ,” began Ben.

“You mean throw a stick of dynamite down in there,” cried Frank, “why, man, it would kill the serpents all right, but it would kill the man who threw it.”

“ – but we don’t have to,” calmly continued the castaway, “’cause we three was practical miners as came up here, two years ago, and we brought ’em with us.”

CHAPTER XXI.

DYNAMITING TO FREEDOM

Ben Stubb’s welcome solution of the problem of how to escape from the valley, came as a great relief to the boys. As he had related the narrative of his years of solitude up there, their hearts had sunk as the realization, that they too might be doomed to the same fate, had invaded them. With the discovery that the prospector had dynamite and the needful apparatus for setting off a blast without injury to the man who fired it, however, their future had assumed a bright tinge, and when they went to bed that night in the rough cave that had been the outcast’s home for such a long time, their dreams of the morrow were pleasant and hopeful.

Both the Chester boys had been deeply worried at the idea of the anxiety their unexplained absence must be causing their father, and Frank bitterly blamed himself for having decided to go forward with the exploration of the tunnel before he had notified his father of their discovery.

They were up betimes and set about the ticklish business of transporting the keg of dynamite to the Serpent Chasm, where it was to be put to such effective use. It was decided that for the purpose for which they required it only a small quantity would be necessary – in fact none of them wanted to run the risk of widening the chasm by placing too heavy a charge. Ben, who was experienced in the use of explosives, figured – the force of dynamite being downward – that if the blast was fired at a depth of roughly two hundred feet down the chasm, that there would be no danger of damaging the upper edges of the abyss so as to render them impossible or to dislodge the chain on which they depended to make their way to freedom.

Before the final preparations to evacuate the valley were set about, however, Ben took steps to hide the bar gold away carefully, with the aid of the boys, who, the warm-hearted sailor insisted, were to receive a share of it as soon as they could make up an expedition to the valley, and return to carry the precious metal out to civilization.

The castaway, too, had another important mission to perform. Beneath that little grove of palms, at the wooded end of the valley already mentioned, there were two rough graves over which Ben had erected two headstones bearing simply his dead comrades’ names and the date of their deaths, carved by his knife. Alone the man who had shared their loneliness went to the spot where the dead prospectors slept their last sleep, and knelt bareheaded over the rough mounds. When he turned to the cave he was more serious than the boys had ever seen him during their brief friendship and he did not speak till everything was declared ready and it was time to lower the keg of high explosive into the shaft.

With the rawhide lariat with which he had rescued them, the keg was carefully belayed into the hole and then one by one the adventurers slid down it. It was with moist eyes the boys looked about them, as they once more trod what, but for Ben Stubbs’ timely intervention, would have been their tomb. One by one they wrung his hand warmly.