“One man go by here pretty short time ago,” he whispered.

“Native?” I asked.

“No, him wear shoes.”

The Raretongan crawled forward on his knees, his face close to the grass.  The tracks upon the soft grass showed that the person was moving in the direction we were going, and for about twenty yards we followed cautiously.  Leith, the one-eyed white man, and the Professor were the only three men on the Isle of Tears, outside Holman and myself, who would be wearing shoes.  It was hard to think that the Professor or Leith would be alone at that moment, so I concluded, as we crawled along in the shadow of the cliff, that the tracks were made by One Eye.

Maru suddenly sprang to his feet and stood listening.  I listened too.  Into the awful silence came a tremendous rumbling that increased each second till I pictured it as a cancer of noise growing with appalling rapidity within the encompassing stillness.

“What is it?” I gasped.  “Why it’s——­”

I understood at that moment, and I sprang toward the jungle, but the big hand of the Raretongan gripped my shoulder and dragged me close to the cliff beneath an overhanging ledge.

“Stay here!” he yelled, raising his voice above the tumult that seemed to be coming out of the heavens.  “Keep close much!”

The noise was deafening.  The black cliff seemed to rock behind us, and as Maru pulled me down on my knees five hundred tons of rock shot from the heights and flattened ten square yards of the packed shrubs immediately in front of us!

“Now!” screamed Maru, as the dust swept in under the ledge and nearly choked us; “we get away quick, plenty dust, they can’t see!”

The dirt and small rocks had rolled back upon us till we stood ankle deep, but the native’s advice was good.  Hugging the wall of the cliff, we ran back on our tracks till we had passed the area devastated by the landslide; then we sprang into the bushes and peered up at the cliff.  High above the cloud of dust that was still rising from the ground, and leaning forward so that he could view the extent of the avalanche, was the one-eyed white man!

“Maru,” I whispered, “go back and get Holman.  I’ll wait here till you come.”

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XIX

LEITH SCORES

The one-eyed man stood for a long time contemplating his handiwork.  From his point of observation he watched the pile of rocks and the surrounding bushes, and the absence of movement convinced him that the job had been well done.  He commenced to make facial contortions as an outlet for the mirth he was generating inside, and at intervals he managed to produce a peculiar noise that reminded one of the bubbling of a camel.  I began to think that One Eye, besides being deaf and dumb, was suffering from a shortage of gray matter inside his ugly-shaped head.  He strutted up and down, and narrowly escaped toppling over the ledge through attempting a cake dance as a grand finale to the insane actions prompted by the successful manner in which he had engineered the landslide.