The white youth had turned a little to look at the old warrior.  Mukoki sat as rigid as a pillar of stone an arm’s reach from him.  Head erect, arms tense, his eyes gleaming strangely, he stared straight out into the gloom between the chasm walls.  Rod shivered.  He knew, knew without questioning, that Mukoki was thinking of the cry!

And at that instant there floated up from the black chaos ahead a sound, a sound low and weird, like the moaning of a winter’s wind through the pine tops, swelling, advancing, until it ended in a shriek—­a shriek that echoed and reechoed between the chasm walls, dying away in a wail that froze the blood of the three who sat and listened!

CHAPTER XII

WABI MAKES A STRANGE DISCOVERY

Mukoki broke the silence which followed the terrible cry.  With a choking sound, as if some unseen hand were clutching at his throat, he slipped from the rock upon which he was sitting and crouched behind it, his rifle gleaming faintly as he leveled it down the chasm.  There came the warning click of Wabigoon’s gun, and the young Indian hunched himself forward until he was no more than an indistinct shadow in the fast-deepening gloom of night.  Only Rod still sat erect.  For a moment his heart seemed to stand still.  Then something leaped into his brain and spread like fire through his veins, calling him to his feet, trembling with the knowledge of what that cry had told him!  It was not a lesson from the wilderness that Roderick Drew was learning now.  As fast as the mind could travel he had gone far back into the strife and misery and madness of civilization, and there he found the language of that fearful cry floating up the chasm.  He had heard it once, twice—­yes, again and again, and the memory of it had burned deep down into his soul.  He turned to his companions, trying to speak, but the horror that had first filled Mukoki now fastened itself on him, and his tongue was lifeless.

“A madman!”

Wabi’s fingers dug into his arm like the claws of a bear.

“A what!”

“A madman!” repeated Rod, trying to speak more calmly.  “The man who shot the bear and fired at Mukoki and who uses gold bullets in his gun is mad—­raving mad!  I have heard those screams before—­in the Eloise insane asylum, near Detroit.  He’s—­”

The words were frozen on his lips.  Again the cry echoed up the chasm.  It was nearer this time, and with a sobbing, terrified sound, something that Wabi had never heard fall from Mukoki’s lips before, the old warrior clung to Roderick’s arm.  Darkness hid the terror in his face, but the white boy could feel it in the grip of his hands.

“Mad, raving mad!” he cried.  Suddenly he gripped Mukoki fiercely by the shoulders, and as Wabigoon crouched forward, ready to fire at the first movement in the gloom, he thrust the butt of his rifle in his back.  “Don’t shoot!” he commanded.  “Mukoki, don’t be a fool!  That’s a man back there, a man who has suffered and starved, starved, mind you!—­until he’s mad, stark mad!  It would be worse than murder to kill him!”