University of Virginia Library

THE DUEL IN THE DEEPER PIT.
BY CUTCLIFFE HYNE.

IT came upon me like the shock of a bullet-wound. The thing was impossible to refute: it was real. The nickel-plated revolver was in the mildewed locker where he said I should find it.

Valpy was mad; his mania was homicide.

The net which his maniac cunning had spun around my life seemed of such malignant strength and grip that no human effort could win me clear of its toils.

For a while I was so stunned by its discovery that Valpy's letter fluttered from my fingers to the coaly mud of the floor, and the fluttering tallow-candle with its stepping of clay threatened to follow it. Peril of life is no great novelty to me. It was not so much the physical danger which caused my head to whirl then, as the shock of the other discovery. Valpy had been my friend for more than twenty years; we had known one another in salon and steamer-room, by tent and camp-fire; our camaraderie had run its course with never a hitch — and now he demanded my life for an offense which could never in possibility have existed. He said in the bitter letter which he left me to read, that I had alienated from him the affections of his wife. Why, the man had no wife.

This challenge of his was no sudden spasm; I saw that he had been contriving for weeks to pin me so that I must fight him. He had laid his plans with consummate skill; laid them, too, in the full sight of myself, and yet never allowed me a gleam or a glimmer of his real object till the time was full and ripe for doing so.

He had found the advertisement in the "Daily Courier," as it were by accident, before my very eyes, and after we had

talked chaffingly about it during a lazy afternoon, it was actually this that suggested his taking up this pit which was offered for lease.

"D'you know, Calvert," he had said, "I've the deuce of a good mind to follow your advice. I'm getting rather bored with wandering over the globe doing nothing. It sounds fascinating to have an occupation in life, and the idea of being a colliery proprietor is, to a man of my antecedents, distinctly bizarre — that is, attractive. Honestly, if this place turns out to be anything like the advertisement states, I believe I'll go in for it. Will you come with me when I go to prospect?"

I had laughed and assented, and for the succeeding days he was as full of the mine as a child with its first schoolboy hobby. Our rooms were littered with plans, tables, reports and specimens. The smuggled Tauchnitz novels had disappeared, the bookcase was reinforced by technical literature of a new genus. Everything about the mine was dinned into my ears about twenty times a day. It was in the neighborhood of a shallow seam of coal recently worked out. The shaft penetrated lower than this, and was known usually as the Deeper Pit. For years it had been unworked, flooded. Now the water had drained away of its own accord — as mine water does once in a thousand times — and the workings were again ready for the collier's pick. The royalties surrounding the original workings could be obtained readily and cheaply. Altogether it was a most desirable property to secure.

So the rusted engine on the pit-bank was cleaned, a wire rope rove over the sheave in the derrick, and the heavy iron cage bent to its end. On a day appointed Valpy and I came to Bromlope to make the descent.

There is a slight feeling of exultation when one drops down the shaft through which living man has not penetrated the entrails of this planet for over sixteen years; and this feeling exhilarates. The cage descended slowly, screaming and grating along the rusted guide-iron, and in a matter of many minutes landed us on a platform of ebony bog left by the receding waters.

With our candles thrust out at shoulder-height, we stepped off the floor of the cage, plodding heavily through the mud. The gallery was low enough to make us crouch our heads; the air was chill and moist. Presently we came to a small oblong cavern which formerly had been the colliers' drawing-room and eating-chamber. Valpy went in first, asking me to remain in the gallery.

Presently he called that I should come to him.

"Look here, old man," he said, thrusting a roll of foolscap into my fingers, "have another turn at geography; make sure how you stand, and then we can move more comfortably. I'll just go out and see if the narrow gallery which runs round the back of this is still sound, or whether it has fallen in."

He went through the doorway and, after the yellow beam of his candle had been swamped in the darkness, I could still hear the faint splashing of his feet in the semi-liquid mud. Then I stuck my candle by its clay socket against the wall, and carelessly unrolled the crisp paper and flattened it out.

So confident had I been that it was merely a map of the mine which had been handed to me, that it caused me a preliminary shock to find it was instead a note scribbled in blue pencil. As I conned through, the hair tickled on my scalp.

Valpy accused me of tampering with the love of this imaginary wife of his, setting forth this indictment with detail and circumstance. He called to my memory the fact that our engine-man on the pit-bank had returned to his home, and had been ordered not to rewind us to the surface for eight more hours. Then he challenged me to fight him to the death. Previous to my entrance into the room he had placed a revolver and cartridges in the locker opposite the door; he himself possessed an armament similar in all respects.

Furthermore, he had observed that our watches coincided. So I should be able to know when he made it exactly 10:30: up to that time there was a truce between us. The second it passed, he gave me his most sacred word of honor, he should set about endeavoring to slay me.

Some people reading so strange a screed under such strange circumstances might have scented the practical joke and endeavored

to treat the matter as such. I knew Valpy too well; he was always an earnest sort of man; and the letter was pious to a degree. By some cerebral lesion he had lost his mind, and as with other mad creatures, his first wrath rose against his stanchest friend. If the chance came to him he would shoot me down like a beast.

Now, as I have said, the first shock stunned me; but the habits of a life spent for the greater part in wild places soon made themselves felt. My own self-preservation clamored to be thought about.

I glanced at my watch. There were left to me four minutes' grace. Then the truce would come to an end, and I might expect war to open at any moment.

Next I blew out the candle-flame. Everything seemed to point to this as a necessity. Then when the cold darkness had closed down, I nipped the smelling wick and slipped the candle into a pocket. It might be wanted again. I most sincerely hoped it would be wanted, because at that stage of the affair I had but one idea in my mind: I must come upon Valpy suddenly and disarm him; the rest would be simple. I was by far his superior in point of bodily strength. First, however, he must be found; and that, moreover, without letting him know he was being sought for until we came to hand-grips. In other words, he must be stalked. This seemed plain enough.

But as I went out of the door into the gallery, a sense of the difficulties of my position began to grow upon me at once. There were two ways to turn — up and down. From the farther side, other galleries led off at right angles; on my own side, there were still others; in fact, as I knew from the maps and plans, the coal seam round the foot of the shaft was burrowed till the reticulations, if measured end on

end, would make a line of tunnel many miles in length. Of course, there would be stoppages at all places where the roof had caved, but these points were to me unknown. Valpy and I had descended the pit mainly to find how frequently they existed.

Thinking of these things, I listened intently. In that black silence the only sound which fell upon the ear was the distant tinkle of some rivulet of water trickling from a roof-track into a shallow pool below. Then a voice startled me.

"Half-past ten, Calvert. I see you have put out your candle, so we begin on entirely even terms. I need hardly recommend you to do your best to kill me. Because if you fail, as sure as God can see us even through all this great roof of rock, so surely will I satisfy my honor with your life."

The voice seemed to come from close to my elbow. On the first tone I began moving toward it, using infinite care to stalk noiselessly. Yet the voice receded before me like an ignis fatuus (if one may use such a word in reference to sound), and I saw that Valpy had anticipated the manoeuver, and was in equal-paced retreat. His original distance I could not guess, because the tunnels acted like a speaking-tube, and carried sounds with little diminution of volume.

I traveled on thus for quite two hundred yards, with every muscle ready to spring, every nerve at highest tension. Then I stopped to listen. At first it appeared that the silence around was absolute, but as my ear strained to even further refinements, it seemed to me that I caught ever and anon the faint hush of breathing. Then, not very far away, a splinter of stone, dislodged from roof or wall, fell with a falsetto splash to the slime of the roadway, and what had before been a suspicion now became a certainty.

Valpy had rounded my flank and was now stalking me!

Let it be confessed that my first thought was for flight. My next, however, pointed out that he was playing my game. If he came upon me in the darkness, I could seize him before he was able to use his weapon; with him once in my grip, I should be content. The gallery there was a good six feet in height, and I leaned against the cold, slime-covered wall with hands half raised. You can guess how keenly I listened for any small sound speaking of his advance, but not the faintest whisper came to me. In our many wanderings Valpy and I had often stalked big game together, and I remembered with a grim smile how well he had earned the title of "Cat" which had once been admirably bestowed upon him by a Bengal shikari. Here he was stalking me now through slush which to another man's movements would have been noisy with squelchings and splashes, and yet, though I felt that he was advancing, yes, and following my spoor with his finger-tips in each footstep, the deep earth-silence was never intruded upon.

Suspense in many of its lurid shapes had been shown to me before, but the agony of that wait for the madman is one of the deepest scars on my memory.

Always far sharper than my own, and now more tartly stung, by insanity, his animal senses showed him my whereabouts first, and he raised the muzzle of the revolver and pulled the trigger.

The sum of what my dazed eyes saw was Valpy's smudged white face, and the pistol, in a dazzling halo of flame. The bullet struck the wall beneath my left armpit, bringing down a small avalanche of shale.

I had no thought of returning his fire. Indeed, my revolver was in my pocket, still unloaded, but I leaped forward, endeavoring to grapple with him before he could get in another shot. Doubling like an eel in the utter darkness, he left a side-pocket of his coat in my hand and fled, giving parting shots behind him till he had emptied his revolver. The lead brought down great sheets of stone from the roof and sides till I thought that the whole stratum must have collapsed about our ears; still no shot touched me, and I crashed on at his heels. But Valpy ran like a deer and distanced me; and at length I slowed down, with hands and arms

bleeding from contact with the rocky walls; and I heard Valpy slack his pace at the same time, and heard also the tinkle of the empty shells as he ejected them and reloaded his revolver.

My original feeling toward my companion had been one of compassion. This was beginning to give way now, and wild anger was coming in its place. What had I done that my life should be so savagely attacked?

The breech of his revolver closed with a vicious snap, and I heard him cock the hammer. Then he halted, waiting for me. I halted too; to advance upon him so would be a demand for instant death. As a general thing he was but an indifferent shot, but now I knew instinctively that he would not fire until the muzzle of his weapon rested against my breast.

He advanced again; I retreated, keeping pace with him; we were both too excited by this time to pay heed about treading delicately. Underneath were L-rails, and on these, our boots slid and clanked. The darkness was profound, and as I ran I steered by trailing raw finger-tips along the jagged walls. The plan of the mine was fixed pretty securely in my head, and twice I turned corners at right angles, hoping that the double would cause him to miss me. He did nothing of the kind, hanging like a dog on the track, and the third time I tried it he laughed loud in derision.

I was hot enough with exertion, heaven knows, but that laugh chilled me to the bone. The particular horror of it was something I could not describe, a something I would wish only my most hateful enemy to experience.

So Valpy hunted me on through the network of the colliery, till a thing happened which brought me to bay whether I wished it or no. The ground rose beneath my feet, and for a while the roof rose too. Then the roof dropped again and the floor slanted up to meet it. There had been a fall of rock. The gallery was barred effectually. The madman was not a dozen yards from my heels.

I turned then like a cornered animal to fight desperately for life. At my feet were jagged masses of newly fallen shale. As if by instinct they found their way into my clutch and with them I opened a furious bombardment of defense.

The roof of the gallery was rotten and crumbling, and where my missiles, vaguely aimed in the darkness, crashed against it, great masses detached themselves and fell into the slime of the roadway. Why merciful Providence prevented me from building myself into a living grave there, I cannot think, but I had the chance in my mind with every splinter of rock that I hurled, and in my savage fury cared not, so that Valpy might be smothered by the avalanche which walled in myself. Far above all that infernal turmoil of crashing stone his pistol-shots rang out shrill and clear, till the thick air grew biting with powder-smoke, and once more the chambers of his weapon were empty. Then, with a final discharge of missiles to herald my coming, I charged furiously at him and he in turn fled away down the gallery.

No longer did I remember that once he had been my friend, that his mind was unhinged, that his state demanded all forbearance. He was my mortal enemy, the object of my most blind and deadly hate; and had I laid hands upon him then I should have ripped the warm life from within him with willing fingers. Taking the revolver from my pocket, I slipped cartridges into the chambers as I ran. His last bullet had scored my side like the scar of a red-hot iron. With gnashing teeth I lusted to smash my fist into the center of his face. Valpy might have been mad all along, but at that moment I was no less a maniac than he.

Then of a sudden the scene changed. The noise of pattering feet in front of me abruptly ceased. There was a heavy splash, a bubbling cry, and — silence.

I halted and listened. No sound came to me through the black gloom save only for the muffled lapping of tiny waves.

Then the noise of a heavy surge echoed down the gallery, and with it came a strangled voice which cried, "Help! for God's sake, help, Calvert!" The voice was drowned in gurglings and splashings, and again an earth-silence snapped down, amid which I could hear my own breathing and those faint slappings of water.

A great revulsion of feeling spread over me like a cold douche. Valpy, mad or

"A DOCTOR TOOK US IN HAND."

sane, was drowning in some dreadful unseen tank, which drained the water of the mine. He could not swim a stroke. If I did not rush then to save him, he would die horribly. My fierce enmity withered and vanished within me; I remembered only the friendship of twenty years.

I strode forward again, stepped over some invisible brink, and sank deeply into water so cold that I emerged from it breathless and gasping. At the same moment Valpy rose again to the surface, almost noiselessly, well-nigh lifeless. My fingers slid out and twined themselves in his hair. Slipping beneath him, I swam for the pair of us, and in that awful darkness may have swum in anything but a straight line. I was tired, faint, bruised; and the deadly chill of the water was paralyzing. I must have gone light-headed then, for a horror seized me that I was on some vast underground lake with shores leagues apart.

I swam on for what seemed hours — months — years — consciousness dimming with every stroke; and when at length I did touch a shelving beach, the last glimmer of sentient life within me died away.

Half in, half out, of that foul tank's broth we lay together, the pair of us, for how many hours I cannot tell; and when the men on the pit-bank above, growing alarmed at our non-appearance, formed a rescue party, they found us still devoid of consciousness.

When we were brought to blessed daylight once more, bruised, bleeding, filthy beyond recognition, a doctor took us both in hand, and through his skill I was little worse for the adventure. But Valpy's case was different. He woke into a raging brain-fever, and the doctor said that the disease must have smoldered in his system for weeks to permit of its arriving at such a sudden and violent head.

Eventually my poor chum recovered, though only after a long and tedious convalescence; but he knew nothing of that awful duel he forced upon me in the black abysses of the Deeper Pit, and to this day I have never told him.