"Emergency call," the young woman's voice was saying. "We must have the line at once."

Smithy handed the telephone to the sheriff. "Someone's anxious to talk to you," he said. He searched his pockets hurriedly, found a ten-dollar bill which he laid on the sheriff's desk. "That will cover it," he said with a new note in his voice. "Perhaps you're not just the man for this job, sheriff. It's going to be a whole lot too hot for you to handle."

He had turned quickly toward the door, but something in the sheriff's excited voice checked him. "Burned? Wiped out, you say?"

Halfway across the room Smithy could hear another hoa.r.s.e voice in the telephone. The sheriff repeated the words. "Red devils! They wasn't Injuns? The whole town of Seven Palms destroyed!"

"I thought," said Smithy softly to himself, "that we'd have to go down _there_ to find _them_, and instead they're out looking for us. Yes, I think this will be decidedly too hot for you to handle, sheriff." He turned and bolted out the door.

An attentive audience was awaiting Gordon Smith on his arrival in Sacramento. Smithy's father was not one to be kept waiting even by the Governor of the state. Also, Smithy was coming from the Tonah Basin region, and the news of the destruction of the desert town of Seven Palms had preceded him. Even the swift planes of the Coastal Service could not match the speed of the radio news.

There were only two men in the room when Smithy entered. One of them, tall, heavily built, as square-shouldered as Smithy, came forward and put his two hands on the young man's shoulders. Their greetings were brief.

"Well, son?" asked the older man, and packed a world of questioning into the interrogation.

"O. K., Dad," said Smithy simply.

His father nodded silently and turned to the other man. "Governor, my son, Gordon. He got tired of being known as the 'Old Man's son'--started out on his own--not looking for adventure exactly, but I judge he has found it. He's got something to tell us."

And again Smithy told his wild, unbelievable tale. But it was not so incredible now, for, even while Smithy was talking, the Governor was glancing at the report on his desk which told of the destruction of the little town of Seven Palms.

"I can't tell you what it means," Smithy concluded. He paused before venturing a prediction which was to prove remarkably accurate. "But I saw them--I saw them come up out of the earth, and I'm betting there are plenty more where they came from. And now that they've found their way out, we've got a sc.r.a.p on our hands. And don't think they're not fighters, either. They're armed--those flame-throwers are nothing we can laugh off, and what else they've got, we don't know."

He leaned forward earnestly across the Governor's desk. "But that's your job," he said. "Mine is to find Dean Rawson. He's alive, or he was. He sent up his ring as proof of it. I've got to find him--I've got to go down in that pit and I want your help."

CHAPTER XI

_The White-Hot Pit_

How far his guard of wild, red man-things had taken him Dean Rawson could not know. Many miles, it must have been. And he knew that the air had grown steadily more stiflingly hot. But the heat of those long tunneled pa.s.sages was like a cool breeze compared with the blasting breath of the room into which he was plunged.

It seared his eyeb.a.l.l.s; it struck down from the tongues of flame that played in red fury in the recess high up on the farther wall. And the vast room, the fires, the hundreds of kneeling figures, all blurred and swam dizzily before him.

The hot air that he breathed seemed crisping his lungs. Vaguely, for the stupefying, brain-numbing heat, he wondered at the figure he saw dimly in its grotesque posturing close to the flames. And the hundreds of others--how could they live? How could he himself go on living in this inferno?

They had been chanting in unison, the kneeling red ones. Dean heard the regular beat of their repeated words change to an uproar of shrill, whistling voices. But he could neither see nor hear plainly for the unbearable, suffocating heat.

The clamor was deafening, confusing; it echoed tremendously in the rocky room and mingled with the steady, continuous roar of the flames.

The ma.s.s of bodies that surged about him made only a blurring impression; he tried to make himself see clearly. He must fight--fight to the last! Only this thought persisted. He was striking out blindly when he knew that his red guard had cleared a way through the mob and was dragging him forward.

He knew when they reached the farther wall. Somewhere above him was the deep-cut niche in which the fires roared. And then, when again he could see from his tortured eyes, he found directly ahead another doorway in the solid rock. Beyond it all was black; it gave promise of coolness, of relief from the stifling air of the room. Red hands were thrusting him through.

The burst of water, icy cold, that descended upon him from above shocked him from the stupor that claimed his senses. He was drenched in an instant, strangling and gasping for breath. But he could think!

And, as the lean hands seized him again and hurried him forward, he almost dared to hope.

To his eyes the pa.s.sageway was a place of utter darkness, but the red ones, their great owl eyes opened wide, hurried him on. His stumbling feet encountered a flight of steps. With the red guard he climbed a winding stair where the tunnel twisted upward.

That icy deluge had set every nerve aquiver with new life. He hardly dared ask himself what might lie ahead. Yet he had been saved from that mob; it might be his life would be spared, that in some way he could learn to communicate with these people, learn more of this subterranean world--which must be of tremendous extent. Without any sure knowledge of their plans, he still was certain in his own mind that they intended to swarm out upon the upper world. He might even be able to show them the folly of that.

A thousand thoughts were flashing through his mind when the tunnel ended. Beyond a square-cut opening the air was aglow with red. An ominous thunder was in his ears. Then a score of hands lifted him bodily and threw him out upon a rocky floor that burned his hands as he fell.

Heat, blistering, unbearable, beat upon him. He was wrapped in quick-rising clouds of steam from his wet clothes.

The platform ended. Far below was a sea of red faces, grotesque and horrible, where each held two ghastly white disks, and at the center of each disk a mere pinpoint eye.

He saw it all in the instant of his falling--the inhuman, shrieking mob, the blast of hot flame not forty feet away at the back of the rocky niche, and, between himself and the flame, a giant figure that leaped exultantly, while its body, that appeared carved from metallic copper, reflected the red fires until it seemed itself aflame.

Dean knew in the fraction of a second while he scrambled to his feet, that the great room had gone silent. The roaring of the flames ceased; even the clamor of shrill voices was stilled. He had thrown one arm across his face to shield his eyes; the heat still poured upon him like liquid fire. But his instant decision to throw himself out and down into the waiting mob was checked by the sudden stillness.

To open his eyes wide meant impossible torture, yet he forced himself to peer through slitted lids beneath the shelter of his arm.

The flame was gone. Where it had been was a wall of shimmering red rock above a gaping throat in the floor, whose rim was quivering white with heat. Here the blast from some volcanic depth had come.

Then he saw it, saw the great coppery figure leaping upon him--and saw more plainly than all this the end that had been prepared for him.

Fire worshipers! Demons of an under world paying tribute to their G.o.d.

And he, Dean Rawson, was to be a living sacrifice, cast headlong to that waiting, white-hot throat!

The coppery giant was upon him in the instant of his realization.

Somehow in that moment Dean Rawson's wracked body pa.s.sed beyond all pain. With the inhuman, maniacal strength of a man driven beyond all reason and restraint he tore himself half free from those encircling arms and drove blow after blow into the hideous face above him.

Only his left arm was free. That, too, was clamped tightly against his body an instant later.

The giant had been between him and the glowing rocks. Now he felt himself whirled in air, and again the blast of heat struck upon him.

He was being rushed backward; and there flashed through his mind, as plainly as if he could actually see it, the scintillant whiteness of that hungry throat.

He tried to lock his legs about the big body to prevent that final heave and throw that would end a ghastly ceremony. The rocks were close, their radiant heat wrapped about him like a living flame.

Abruptly his strength was gone--the fight was over--he had lost! His heart sent the blood pounding and thundering to his brain; his lungs seemed on fire.

The high priest of the red ones had his priestly duty to perform--the sacrifice must be offered. But even the high priest, it would seem, must have been not above personal resentment. Sacrilege had been done--a fist had smashed again and again into the holy one's face.

This it must have been that made him pause, that brought one big hand up in a grip of animal rage about Dean's throat.