Free Complete El Borak (Pulp Heroes and Villains) by Robert E. Howard Page B

the sloping lip of a fissure and he shot down and vanished so suddenly it was like the unreality of a dream.
     
    Gordon reached the crevice and glared down into echoing darkness. He could see nothing, but the chasm seemed bottomless. With an angry shrug he turned away, disappointed.
     
    Behind the stony shelf Gordon found Yasmeena lying with her arms bound, where Ormond had flung her down. Her soft slippers hung in tatters, and the bruises and abrasions on her tender flesh told of Ormond’s brutal attempts to force her at top speed along the rocky path.
     
    Gordon cut her cords and she caught his arms with all her old fierceness of passion. There was no fear in her eyes now, only wild excitement.
     
    “They said you were dead!” she cried. “I knew they lied! They cannot kill you any more than they can kill the mountains or the wind that blows across them. You have Yogok. I saw him. He knows the secret paths better than the monk Ormond killed. Let us go, while the Kirghiz are killing the Turkomans! What if we have no supplies? It is summer. We shall not freeze. We can starve for a while if need be. Let us go!”
     
    “I brought those men to Yolgan with me for my own purposes, Yasmeena,” he replied. “Even for you I can’t desert them.”
     
    She nodded her splendid head. “I expected that from you, El Borak.”
     
    Ormond’s rifle lay nearby but there were no cartridges for it. He cast it over the precipice and, taking Yasmeena’s hand, led her back to the ledge where Yogok lay yammering.
     
    Gordon hauled him erect and pointed to the gorge where the white puffs spurted.
     
    “Is there a way to reach that gorge without returning to the valley? Your life depends on it.”
     
    “Half these gorges have hidden exits,” answered Yogok, shivering. “That one has. But I cannot guide you along that route with my arms tied.”
     
    Gordon unbound his hands, but tied the girdle about the priest’s waist and retained the other end in his hand. “Lead on,” he ordered.
     
    Yogok led them back along the ledge they had just traversed to a point where, halfway along it, it was cut by a great natural causeway of solid stone. They made their way along it, with dizzy depths echoing on either hand, to a broad ledge which skirted a deep canyon. They followed this ledge around a colossal crag and after a while Yogok plunged into a cave which opened upon the narrow path.
     
    This they traversed in semidarkness relieved by light which filtered in from a ragged crevice in the roof. The cave wound steeply downward, following a fault in the rock, and they came out at last in a triangular cleft between towering walls. The narrow slit which was the cave mouth opened in a side of the cleft and was masked from outer view by a spur of rock that looked like part of a solid wall. Gordon had looked into that cleft the day before and failed to discover the cave.
     
    The sound of firing had grown louder as they advanced along the twisting cave, and now it filled the defile with thundering echoes. They were in the gorge of the Turkomans. Gordon saw the wiry warriors crouching among the boulders at the mouth, firing at the fur-capped heads which appeared among the rocks of the outer slopes.
     
    He shouted before they saw him, and they nearly shot him before they recognized him. He went toward them, dragging Yogok with him, and the warriors stared in silent amazement at the shivering priest and the girl in her tattered finery. She scarcely noticed them; they were wolves whose fangs she did not fear; all her attention was centered on Gordon. When a bullet whined near her she did not flinch.
     
    Men crouched at the mouth of the ravine, firing into it. Bullets hummed back up the gut.
     
    “They stole up in the darkness,” grunted Orkhan, binding up a bleeding bullet hole in his forearm. “They had the gorge mouth surrounded before our sentries saw them. They cut the throat of the sentry we had stationed down the ravine and came