There were six of the hairs, pure, glistening white, and over three feet long. Stewart examined then in expressive silence, then passed them along; and when they reached me, they stayed.
The cave, lighted up by a blazing fire, appeared to me a forbidding, uncanny place. Small, peculiar round holes, and dark cracks, suggestive of hidden vermin, gave me a creepy feeling; and although not over-sensitive on the subject of crawling, creeping things, I voiced my disgust.
“Say, I don’t like the idea of sleeping in this hole. I’ll bet it’s full of spiders, snakes and centipedes and other poisonous things.”
Whatever there was in my inoffensive declaration to rouse the usually slumbering humor of the Arizonians, and the thinly veiled ridicule of Colonel Jones, and a mixture of both in my once loyal California friend, I am not prepared to state. Maybe it was the dry, sweet, cool air of Nail Canyon; maybe my suggestion awoke ticklish associations that worked themselves off thus; maybe it was the first instance of my committing myself to a breach of camp etiquette. Be that as it may, my innocently expressed sentiment gave rise to bewildering dissertations on entomology, and most remarkable and startling tales from first-hand experience.
“Like as not,” began Frank in matter-of-fact tone. “Them’s tarantuler holes all right. An’ scorpions, centipedes an’ rattlers always rustle with tarantulers. But we never mind them—not us fellers! We’re used to sleepin’ with them. Why, I often wake up in the night to see a big tarantuler on my chest, an’ see him wink. Ain’t thet so, Jim?”
“Shore as hell,” drawled faithful, slow Jim.
“Reminds me how fatal the bite of a centipede is,” took up Colonel Jones, complacently. “Once I was sitting in camp with a hunter, who suddenly hissed out: ‘Jones, for God’s sake don’t budge! There’s a centipede on your arm!’ He pulled his Colt, and shot the blamed centipede off as clean as a whistle. But the bullet hit a steer in the leg; and would you believe it, the bullet carried so much poison that in less than two hours the steer died of blood poisoning. Centipedes are so poisonous they leave a blue trail on flesh just by crawling over it. Look there!”
He bared his arm, and there on the brown-corded flesh was a blue trail of something, that was certain. It might have been made by a centipede.
“This is a likely place for them,” put in Wallace, emitting a volume of smoke and gazing round the cave walls with the eye of a connoisseur. “My archaeological pursuits have given me great experience with centipedes, as you may imagine, considering how many old tombs, caves and cliff-dwellings I have explored. This Algonkian rock is about the right stratum for centipedes to dig in. They dig somewhat after the manner of the fluviatile long-tailed decapod crustaceans, of the genera Thoracostraca, the common crawfish, you know. From that, of course, you can imagine, if a centipede can bite rock, what a biter he is.”
I began to grow weak, and did not wonder to see Jim’s long pipe fall from his lips. Frank looked queer around the gills, so to speak, but the gaunt Stewart never batted an eye.
“I camped here two years ago,” he said, “An’ the cave was alive with rock-rats, mice, snakes, horned-toads, lizards an’ a big Gila monster, besides bugs, scorpions’ rattlers, an’ as fer tarantulers an’ centipedes—say! I couldn’t sleep fer the noise they made fightin’.”
“I seen the same,” concluded Lawson, as nonchalant as a wild-horse wrangler well could be. “An’ as fer me, now I allus lays perfickly still when the centipedes an’ tarantulers begin to drop from their holes in the roof, same as them holes up there. An’ when they light on me, I never move, nor even breathe fer about five minutes. Then they take a notion I’m dead an’ crawl off. But sure, if I’d breathed I’d been a goner!”
All of this was playfully intended for the extinction of an unoffending and impressionable tenderfoot.
With an admiring glance at my tormentors, I rolled out my sleeping-bag and crawled into it, vowing I would remain there even if devil-fish, armed with pikes, invaded our cave.
Late in the night I awoke. The bottom of the canyon and the outer floor of our cave lay bathed in white, clear moonlight. A dense, gloomy black shadow veiled the opposite canyon wall. High up the pinnacles and turrets pointed toward a resplendent moon. It was a weird, wonderful scene of beauty entrancing, of breathless, dreaming silence that seemed not of life. Then a hoot-owl lamented dismally, his call fitting the scene and the dead stillness; the echoes resounded from cliff to cliff, strangely mocking and hollow, at last reverberating low and mournful in the distance.
How long I lay there enraptured with the beauty of light and mystery of shade, thrilling at the lonesome lament of the owl, I have no means to tell; but I was awakened from my trance by the touch of something crawling over me. Promptly I raised my head. The cave was as light as day. There, sitting sociably on my sleeping-bag was a great black tarantula, as large as my hand.
For one still moment, notwithstanding my contempt for Lawson’s advice, I certainly acted upon it to the letter. If ever I was quiet, and if ever I was cold, the time was then. My companions snored in blissful ignorance of my plight. Slight rustling sounds attracted my wary gaze from the old black sentinel on my knee. I saw other black spiders running to and fro on the silver, sandy floor. A giant, as large as a soft-shell crab, seemed to be meditating an assault upon Jones’s ear. Another, grizzled and shiny with age or moonbeams I could not tell which—pushed long, tentative feelers into Wallace’s cap. I saw black spots darting over the roof. It was not a dream; the cave was alive with tarantulas!
Not improbably my strong impression that the spider on my knee deliberately winked at me was the result of memory, enlivening imagination. But it sufficed to bring to mind, in one rapid, consoling flash, the irrevocable law of destiny—that the deeds of the wicked return unto them again.
I slipped back into my sleeping-bag, with a keen consciousness of its nature, and carefully pulled the flap in place, which almost hermetically sealed me up.
“Hey! Jones! Wallace! Frank! Jim!” I yelled, from the depths of my safe refuge.
Wondering cries gave me glad assurance that they had awakened from their dreams.
“The cave’s alive with tarantulas!” I cried, trying to hide my unholy glee.
“I’ll be durned if it ain’t!” ejaculated Frank.
“Shore it beats hell!” added Jim, with a shake of his blanket.
“Look out, Jones, there’s one on your pillow!” shouted Wallace.
Whack! A sharp blow proclaimed the opening of hostilities.
Memory stamped indelibly every word of that incident; but innate delicacy prevents the repetition of all save the old warrior’s concluding remarks: “Damndest place I was ever in! Tarantulas by the million—centipedes, scorpions, bats! Rattlesnakes, too, I’ll swear. Look out, Wallace! there, under your blanket!”
From the shuffling sounds which wafted sweetly into my bed, I gathered that my long friend from California must have gone through motions creditable to a contortionist. An ensuing explosion from Jones proclaimed to the listening world that Wallace had thrown a tarantula upon him. Further fearful language suggested the thought that Colonel Jones had passed on the inquisitive spider to Frank. The reception accorded the unfortunate tarantula, no doubt scared out of its wits, began with a wild yell from Frank and ended in pandemonium.
While the confusion kept up, with whacks and blows and threshing about, with language such as never before had disgraced a group of old campers, I choked with rapture, and reveled in the sweetness of revenge.
When quiet reigned once more in the black and white canyon, only one sleeper lay on the moon-silvered sand of the cave.
At dawn, when I opened sleepy eyes, Frank,