The Dancers of Noyo by Margaret St. Clair Page B

banks and patches, drifting across the hills and up from the water. There were occasional spots of sunlight, but generally it was a cold day. I shivered as I walked.
     
                  My mind was busy with speculations about the disappearance of the Navarro tribe. I hadn't seen any foodstuffs anywhere; could they possibly have all gone off berrying , fishing, or something of the sort? It was wildly improbable. Their Dancer would certainly never have gone berrying . And what about Harvey's bow?
     
                  Noon came. I got a lucky shot at a quail, and roasted it, with a few leaves of fennel inside, in the ashes of a fire of dry seaweed. Kelp ashes give a rather pleasant salty flavor to wild meat.
     
                  Feeling much refreshed, no longer shivering, I started walking again. I got to Mallo Pass without really noticing it.
     
                  In the old days, when California was first opened to Europeans, Mallo Pass had the reputation of being the most difficult place to get past on the whole coast. The sides are exceptionally sheer, the gulch exceptionally long and high. Pack-mule trains used to take a couple of days to get through it. The highway engineers had eventually dealt with it in a radical manner, putting one enormous fill in the middle of the pass and running the highway over it. There had been a spur road off to a spectacular "vista point."
     
                  It had been that way when California had been still one state. A succession of severe earthquakes, plus dynamiting by assorted tourists, had blown the fill all over the landscape; and when the Republic of California had taken Highway One over, it had run the road somewhat back from the water, crossing the pass at a point that required considerably less fill. So a pedestrian crossing the pass couldn't see down to the water at the mouth of the pass itself. For that he would have to leave the road.
     
                  I was in the middle of the long loop across the pass when I received an abrupt, stabbing impression of distress. Somebody down in the pass—somebody out in the water of the pass—was silently screaming for help.
     
                  Harvey! It must be he; I was convinced it couldn't be anybody else. The next instant I doubted not only the identification but the very impression of distress. I had been under constant stress for days. I must have fancied it.
     
                  I hesitated. Common sense prevailed. It was so improbable that Harvey should be somewhere below that I could ignore the possibility. But when I had made the long loop and was once more back at the cliff edge, and Mallo Pass was really past, the impression returned, this time with an intensity that was staggering.
     
                  Was it really so unlikely that Harvey should be somewhere below? He had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, along with a lot of other people, and ...
     
                  Feeling like a fool, but very much relieved that I had decided to yield to my uneasiness, I ran back along the road to a point where I could get down over the side. I dumped my bow and quiver at the edge of the road and then plunged through the brush, sliding along gravel and stone and half falling for yards at a time—it was a very steep slope—until I was near enough to the beach to see the rocks.
     
                  Over to the right, where the long sharp ridge reached out. picturesquely into the water, there was a lower double pyramidal spire of rocks, like two scaled-down Matterhorns, that rose jaggedly from the foaming, slate-colored water. Low down against the rock of the spire, only a few inches above the waves, there was a dark spheroid. It moved, and I thought I heard a feeble cry. Harvey! How had he got there? My esp must be better than I had thought. As the wave receded, I caught the glint of metal and realized