Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook Page B

wind swirled around him and the visibility dropped to a couple of metres. The Man could be lying wounded on the other side of the mullock heap or he could be circling around the other heaps through the dust towards Shaw from any direction. Shaw knew in his heart that he hadn’t hit him.
    He paused briefly, then slung the gun over his shoulder with the strap to the back as before and climbed quickly down the shaft.
    ‘Did you hit him?’ said Katie.
    ‘No. I don’t think so,’ said Shaw.
    They moved into the chamber.
    A great cluster of heavy stones came crashing down the shaft.
    ‘Now he’s filling in this shaft,’ said Katie.
    ‘He can’t fill them all in,’ said Shaw, foolishly, for want of something else to say.
    He edged forward and tried to look up the shaft, wondering whether he could get a shot at the Man as he scraped the earth down on them. But all he could see was the falling debris and dust and the now much darker circle of light at the entrance to the shaft. A small stone hit him on the forehead and he drew back.
    ‘We’d better get into another part of the tunnel,’ he said. ‘Wait a moment.’ He broke the gun, took out the spent cartridge and inserted another. It was the last cartridge. He had only two shots left. He uncocked the gun and led Katie down into the darkness of the tunnel.
    They came to another shaft and the light was so dim now they could hardly see each other.
    ‘I think what we’d better do,’ said Shaw, ‘is wait in the middle of one of these tunnels. If he comes down after us we’ll see him or hear him before he reaches us. We’ve still got two cartridges left.’
    ‘But you said he couldn’t come down,’ said Katie.
    Shaw didn’t remember saying that.
    ‘He might.’
    ‘Isn’t it, mightn’t it be worth going up again and trying to shoot him? I’ll try if you like.’
    ‘It’s too late now,’ said Shaw. ‘He’ll be ready for that. And it’s getting dark.’ He cursed himself for his weakness in not killing the Man when he had the chance. ‘I think our best bet’s to wait here. At least until daylight.’
    ‘But if he comes down…?’
    ‘If he comes down we can handle him,’ said Shaw with considerably more authority than he felt. ‘Let’s have a look at this tunnel.’ He took out his matches. From the now very faint glow from the shafts at either end they could see the tunnel was about twenty metres long and about a metre wide. There had been several falls of earth but the squares of timber shoring it up every metre or so seemed sound enough. Shaw could almost stand upright.
    The match went out.
    ‘If we wait in the middle of this,’ said Shaw, ‘he can’t get at us in a hurry. What I want you to do is take the matches and when I call out “Match”, or we hear a sound, I want you to strike one and throw it towards whichever way he’s coming. That’ll give me a shot at him. I’ll be sitting here with the gun cocked. He can’t get near us.’
    ‘All night?’
    ‘The only alternative is to go up one of the shafts, hope to Christ he doesn’t see us then run off into the bloody dust storm.’
    ‘I’d sooner do that,’ said Katie.
    Shaw hesitated.
    ‘Look, if I thought there was a chance of our finding the car so would I…but spending the night in that storm…without water, and then the sun tomorrow…no. I think it’s better here. He can’t get us and there’s every chance the police will come out tomorrow. I told them I was only going out for the afternoon.’
    ‘ If I don’t hear from you in a couple of days I’ll come out and get you ,’ the policeman had said.
    Katie, now only a very slight shadow in the tunnel, was silent for a moment contemplating the horror of spending the night in the darkness waiting, staring into the blackness. She remembered the stench of the Man and started thinking she was smelling him, then she realised she was only remembering.
    ‘Did you smell him?’ she said involuntarily.
    ‘No, I didn’t,’