more serious but for the thickness of your Arctic coat.
The Dead Priests and a Life Saved
"The fellow fell dead beside you, and under the circumstances I felt compelled to shoot the other one also; for they were both insane with the delirium of their bloody rites, and I knew that our lives would never be safe as long as they remained fit for mischief.
"I'm sorry to have had to start killing right and left like this, but I reckon that's the lot of all invaders, wherever they go. It's our second lesson, and I think it will prove final.
"When their priests were dead, the rest had no fight in them. In fact, they never intended to harm us; but nobody knows what those two chaps might have led them into. My conscience is easy about them, anyhow."
"How long have I been here?" I asked.
"Two days by the calendar clock," said Jack.
"Yes," Edmund assented; "two days. I never saw a man so knocked out by a little shock, for your wound wasn't much. I fixed that up in five minutes. You must have been scared to the very bottom of your soul—not that I blame you, however. But look at yourself."
He held a pocket-mirror before me, and then I saw that my hair was streaked with gray.
"But we haven't been idle in the mean time,” Edmund went on. "I've got two sleds nearly completed, and tomorrow—earth time—I mean to set out."
My wound was very slight, and the effects of the shock had all passed off during my long spell of insensibility. In an hour or two I was aroused, busy with the others.
I found that Edmund had already picked out the natives that he meant to take with us. They were a dozen huge fellows, who, he had discovered, possessed more than average intelligence. Among them was one of the smiths, the best of the lot, and for convenience Edmund had given him a name, something resembling that by which his comrades called him—Juba.
Starting the Sled Trip
Among his other apparently infinite stores of useful things in the car Edmund had a roll of small, strong steel cable, and this now came admirably into play. The two sleds were pitched one behind another with a piece of the cable, and a line about a hundred feet long connected them with the car. The latter could thus rise to a considerable height without lifting the sleds from the ground.
The sleds were provisioned from the stores of the natives, and we took some of their food in the car also, not merely to eke out our own, but because we had come to like it.
The fellows selected to join our expedition made no objection. On the contrary, they seemed proud to accompany us, and were evidently envied by their comrades.
The scene at starting was a strange one. About five hundred natives, the entire population of the group of caverns belonging to their tribe, which were distributed over about a square mile, assembled at the entrance to our cavern to see us off. As we started, the natives on the sleds, being unused to the motion, clung together like so many awkward white bears taking a ride in a circus.
Their friends stood about the ill-omened sacrificial-stone, waving their long arms, while their huge eyes goggled in the starlight.
Jack in a burst of enthusiasm, fired four or five shots from his pistol. As the reports crashed through the heavy air, you should have seen the crowd vanish down the hole! The sight made me wince when I thought that they must have gone down like a cataract, all heaped together.
But they were tough, and I trust that no heads Were broken. The effect on our twelve fellows on the sleds came near being disastrous. I thought that they would leap off and run, and no doubt they would have done so but for the fact that Edmund put on so much speed that a new terror instantly took the place of the old one.
Instinct taught them not to jump, when the ground was spinning away under them at the rate of sixty miles an hour. Edmund brought Jack sharply to book for his thoughtlessness.
"Give me your pistol," he said, in his old masterful way, which nobody that I ever saw could stand against.
Jack was almost twice his size, but he handed over the pistol like a rebuked schoolboy.
"When you learn how to use it, I'll give it back to you," said Edmund, and that closed the incident.
The plan of the sleds worked like magic.
A Hundred Mile an Hour Sleigh Ride
After their first fear had vanished, the natives began immensely to enjoy the new sensation. Edmund worked up the speed, as he had promised, to a hundred miles an hour, and even for us in the car it was a glorious spin.
But there was one danger that had to be guarded against—the mouths of the cavern.
As I have told you, the natives were divided into tribes, each tribe being in possession of a group, of caverns. These caverns were undoubtedly of natural origin, but why they were not more uniformly distributed over the surface I cannot say.
Anyhow, the fact was that perhaps forty or fifty pits would be found, scattered over a mile or two of ground, and many of them connected by underground passages; and then there would be a long distance without any caverns. All seemed to be inhabited; and to that fact we owed, in a great measure, the safety of the sleds.
The shafts of light issuing from the caverns were so many beacons in the endless night, telling us where the underground settlements lay; and so we avoided running the sleds into the holes, although we had one or two narrow escapes as it was.
Twice Edmund insisted on stopping at a group of caverns to make the acquaintance of their inhabitants. On both occasions we descended into the caves, and found the creatures at home. Whether they would have received us so civilly if we had not taken Juba along I can't say.
