Red Legion

## Foreward

FOREWORD :

OUT OF THE hideous mire of futility, out
of the lost, near-forgotten glories of the
Indian Race, comes again a striving — even
into the present!

Out of vanished power and Empire,
comes today the word of the Red Men:
"We live on, and we know. We will again
be great . . ."

Under Death Valley; under Butte, Mon-
tana; under many Western states; out of
the green hell of South America; out of
Yucatan; of Central America; and out of
Mexico — come many reports that there are
large areas of the Elder caves held by
Indians. These areas the white monopoly
of all antique ray people, for all their mock-
ing and their vaunting and suppression, are
unable to overcome.

There, still today, something of an an-
cient art and wisdom vastly different in
every way from that of the white-domi-
nated ray caverns survives — untouched by
the corruption and blight of modern ray
evils. ,

There, too, survives that savagery and
worship of strange Gods characterized by
the Aztec ceremony of cutting the heart
out of a living victim — and offering it to
their "God."

There, too, survives something best char-
acterized by the poem of Longfellow —
"Hiawatha," known to all of you. That
something that lives in all men, but which
many Indians still call "The Great Spirit."

There, too, survives a white and pitiful
tiling that once was red and courageous
and strong. Other things that once were
men, are no longer enough like men to be
so called.

I am going to tell you a story of the
struggles of the Red Men in the caverns,
those who have preserved their courage
and their intelligence, and their noble ef-
forts to make of the ancient secrets a pow-
erful tool for the rehabilitation of the
Red Race.

It is a historic fact that whole tribes of
Indians mysteriously vanished without
trace before the advance of the white man.
It is not so generally known that they
disappeared, in many cases, into the fearful
vastnesses of the labyrinthine mysteries
of the Elder Race's former home.

The traveler in the white-dominated por-
tions of the caverns today finds the marks

of their Indian cooking fires against the
walls of polished and carved walls, the
water jars and pottery, the crude wall
paintings, sometimes overlaying the glori-
ous work of the Elder Race. These things
they have left all through the American
caverns — and they are things left by In-
dians of culture completely the same as
the Red Men of Revolutionary times. For
many tribes of Indians of those times when
they fled ever westward from civilization
(as we whites call our social order) knew
of the God caverns and the tremendous
things they contained. But they appar-
ently did not know how to use these things.

How much they did know of the opera-
tion and use of the terrific power of the
Elder machines we cannot know, but we
do know that for two centuries no "spirit-
ualist" "sent his spirit" into the "spirit
world" without an "Indian guide." That
this ever-present "Indian-guide" in all spir-
itualist doings was the descendant of those
same tribes who fled into the eternal dark-
ness and fearful wonder of the underworld
to escape the white man's massacre of the
Indian is very plain to anyone who knows
anything of the history and the customs
of the caverns. That they did not use the
weapons, but only the telaug, is easily
understood when one knows of the Elder
Race custom of sealing all weapons against
casual search; within great vaults that are
not casually found by the ignorant.

To those who know of the trickery and
deceit always practised by the underworld
peoples to hide the existence of their
homes, this Indian guide to the "spiritual-
ists" is very recognizable as the Indian race
in the caverns hiding themselves with an
easily committed lie. That they should
assist white spiritualists at their "seances"
seems to furnish a picture of their inability
to find a practical use for their time in the
mysterious world of darkness. To one who
has seen what the Indian of the caverns
has become from the effects of lack of
sunlight and air and proper food, one can
understand why the Red Men of the caves
have not been a very potent force in
American history.

That these "Indian guides" are a phe-
nomena never encountered much of late
years speaks volumes to one who knows
of the constant warfare and the fragile

THE RED LEGION

93

margin on which life persists in the caves.

They, the original Red Men, the original
tribes who entered the darkness, must have
been recently persecuted and pursued and
killed until they are no longer there in any
numbers.

But, one hears from the West that still
the Red Men struggle for life in the western
and southern states and are succeding in
holding large areas against the modern
white monopolists: those same suppressors
and secretives who keep the mighty wisdom
of the Elder Work in the caverns from
modern men of the surface.

This story is of that struggle: to give
you these heretofore unwritten pages of
the secret (in this case quite recent) his-
tory of our earth.

## Chapter I

**CHAPTER I**

**Death Speaks to the Legion**

THE voice, out of the dark silence of
the night, had said: "Every day one
member of your Red Legion shall die."
Eonee Lane had paid no attention, for a
voice in the night out of nowhere he knew
could be anything. Could be his nerves,
imagination, or the mischeivous and mad
ones of the unseen below.

But, one by one, the men of the Red
Legion about Butte, Montana — had died!

One! Every day — one more! One
every day! Why?

So hard it had been, building the Legion
of the Loyal Red Men. . . .

Out of the hideous mire of futility that
had consumed the Red Men;

Out of the miserable remnants of his
race he had welded together this striving,
active, educated and aware and able force
of young men, seen it grow in numbers
and in skill at the secret role they must
play;

Out of a defeated and complacent noth-
ing he had built, through the years, a
strong and united spirit in the sons of
his race, men who knew what terrific power
might yet be won by them.

Now, suddenly, the unseen and mys-
terious underworld forces that had helped
him so long; that had caused the Red
Legion to grow almost miraculously to
become a strong secret power through all
the west; had turned instead into a de-
stroying blight about Montana.

Every day some Indian friend's death
was reported in the Butte daily news. No
one noticed these deaths, apparently, but
Lane. So far as he knew no one else had
heard the voices in the night mocking the
Red Legion and prophesying a daily death
for its members; a prophecy that came true
every day!

Each death was one strong son the an-
cient blood who had joined the legion.

Lane bent his black head into his arms,
his strong back slumped over his desk.
He felt old and beaten, though he was but
thirty-eight.

The sun, shining redly out of the west
into his wide office window, outlined the
letters: "E. Lane and J. Stevens — Attor-
neys."

```
* * *

```

ANOTHER, of very different apearance
from surface man, but of the ancient
blood that can still produce such vigorous
fighters as Jim Thorpe and in the past has
produced its share of Hiawathas — many,
many men, now forgotten whose deeds rang
then in the ears of all men on the Ameri-
can continent — yes, another of that fierce
and ancient blood knew too of the deaths.
Johnny Ahahne, his name, and he knew
too, why these deaths occurred.

Johnny Ahahne, for the past few months,
was reduced to bearing burdens. Before
that, he had been a high-placed, some-
what lazy, member of the ruling caste of
the tribe of Indians who held the caverns
under Montana. They had more wealth
and more power than most white men ever
dream of possessing. They had, too, an
ancient inability to make much use of the
wealth and power — through lack of desire.

Johnny Ahahne, Indian bearer, glanced
at the notice, printed in, to him, nearly
unreadable English words. Carries not
Delivered on Deep Levels. He adjusted
his tump strap, straightened his lean mus-
cular legs under the 150-pound pack of
luxury items from the surface. Silently
he thanked the Great Spirit, and the mighty
invisible serpent who had given his brothers
courage to face death rather than submit
to carrying the heavy packs to the deepest
lower levels. Now they were not required
to travel beyond their strength. Inwardly
Johnny realized that this leniency was
exercised only in order to keep them alive
and available.

94

AMAZING STORIES

As Johnny plodded off into the dimly-lit
boring his hand slid into his loin cloth,
fumbled for an instant with a folded bit of
paper. His brothers on the surface must
know of what had come to pass. Of the
fate that had overtaken the ancient, secret
and aloof strength of the Red Men of
under-earth. The Red Legion had been
their favorite project for the future. They
must be told; those red brothers on the
surface. They must be warned of what
had happened down here.

Two miles from the "Express Office"
Johnny looked about carefully. Then he
reached with his mind's awareness for the
ionizing of any watchray upon him. At
last, convinced he was unobserved, he
slipped the little paper out of his loin cloth
and slid it into a tiny unmarked crevice
in the ancient hardened rock of the wall.
Silently, unthinkingly, his mind a careful
blank, Johnny Ahahne plodded on his long
carry into the dark.

He did not love the white European ray
people. This Da Sylva woman who had
taken over the Elder caverns under Butte,
Montana, was a cruel creature, and her
gang was worse, when possible. When the
short, bloody, decisive battle was over,
there was left alive but a few hundred of
the red warriors. For them was designated
the labor, the dirty jobs no one else wanted,
and the working of the ancient mines.
Johnny, as so many of his ancestors in the
past, cursed his heathen curses on all white
men and moved on into the ever-dark.

But the little paper did not remain in
the unnoticeable slot in the hardened rock
of the ancient cavern wall. An hour later
another bearer paused, reached with his
mind to sense the ionizing of the watch
rays, looked at the age-old dust to watch
the furry bristling that tattled on the
electric flows of a watch ray. The bristling
dust died into quiescence, it was but the
wind of his slight movement. He reached
into the slot, took the paper. Many days
he had looked into the secret place, found
nothing. Today there was a message. He
knew it was for the red brothers on the
surface — those who knew.

By such stages the paper finally reached
the surface. In the overalls of a red-
skinned cowhand the paper traveled toward
Butte.

* \* \*

TN Butte, Lane's partner, Jack Stevens,
A parked his Buick coupe near the long-

limbed animal from the Ranch of the
Elder Twin. Stevens stood by his car ab-
sently filling his pipe, his tall, spare, wide
shouldered figure well dressed in dark gray,
well-pressed worsted. His aquiline, high
cheek-boned face was expressionless. Only
the glitter of his heavy-lidded black eyes
betrayed his intent awareness. Only the
Indians who belonged to the Red Legion
knew that the Ranch of the Elder Twin
was built over an ancient Entrance to the
Elder World; a world that only the In-
dians of this part of the west knew existed.
Only a few of the Indians knew that the
Elder Twin was a living God who inhab-
ited the deeper caverns of the Elder World.
Only a very few of them fully realized
the tremendous nature of the secret cov-
ered by that low-built ranch house.

Stevens stood still a long time, eyeing
that rangy bay horse from the ranch.
Johnny Ahahne's voice had told him in the
night there would be a message — written
— that he could depend on; that would be
no fake by some imp of the dark.

The cowhand came out of the store,
swung into the saddle, moved down the
wide street. Stevens bent, picked up the
paper. The Red Legion had contacted the
unseen.

SHORTLY Stevens entered the office
that bore his and Lane's names on the
window.

Lane looked up at his partner, but did
not move from his slumped, discouraged
position at the big desk. Stevens tossed
the still-folded paper in front of Lane.

Lane's dark eyes quickened. He picked
up the paper, unfolded it jerkily. On it
was a series of pictographs, readable only
to a few Indians; or to a student who
knew the lesser languages of the Indians.
They are few.

As Lane pored over the message, two
men came into the office. They were cow-
hands of Indian blood from another ranch
near Butte, the Barred Y. Lane passed
the message to one of these men, sat
watching his face as he deciphered the
near-forgotten symbols. One by one more
and more men filed into the office. Lane
knew by the man's face that he was not
wrong, that the message meant exactly
what he had read it to mean. There was
no mistake. The Red Legion was doomed
if it stayed here.

The Brotherhood of the Unseen had

THE RED LEGION

95

given the sign.

THERE were now some thirty dark,
hawk-faced young men gathered in the
big office room. Ten of them took seats
about a broad oak table. The rest stood
in the rear, in the shadows, watching stol-
idly with emotionless eyes — they were all
Indian today. That Stevens and Lane
were names taken to avoid white prejudice
against the Indian origin of the men only
themselves knew, for no one else cared.
There were many of Indian blood. Lane
took the chair at the head of the table.
But he did not sit hi it. He stood, face
upraised, hands oustretfhed, both hands
with palms upward, fingers extended. Sol-
emnly he intoned,

"Eemeeshee, our great Breath-Master,
twin brother of the Wolf of the Skys, we
beg your guidance and your blessing upon
us. Each day for one month, one of us has
died. The voices have told us that this
will continue until all who know the Elder
Secret are dead. Will you, we implore you,
ancient one, come from your dreams and
aid us?"

Into the stodgy law-office stole an awe-
some breath out of Time, a breath from the
far past of the glories of the Red Race. And
into each dark expressionless face of the
Indians gathered there came a brightening;
a hope. Their ancient God lived. He had
answered. He had not answered- their
prayers since their fathers were young
men. All had felt his mighty breath stir-
ring primevally in the dusty law office.

```
* * *

```

MANY hundreds of miles away, and
many miles underground — a living
being turned slowly from his vast crystal-
line instrument panel. It was good to hear
his name "Eemeeshee" again upon the lips
of men. Once, long ago, the red men had
plagued him nigh to death with their pray-
ers; he had shut off the listening electric
ears of the huge machine that brought to
him the thoughts of men up in the sun-
light. Time had slipped by in the strange
dream life he led. He had turned on the
great magic ear again, and had heard but
one voice questing him from among the
many thought voices intermingling, the
voice of Eonee Lane of Butte, Montana.
Delicately he had sought with the direc-
tive dial needles for the source of that
thought, and had almost brought the scene
in the law office into his screens. But it
was too far; he had given up after a time.
Eemeeshee was not industrious.

Mayhap you have seen ancient Indian
drawings of their gods floating in the air
over the heads of their rulers. Horrible
appearing things, with. foot-long noses and
wide ears like an elephant, gross bodies
and peculiar looking limbs. Those artists
were not liars, for . . .

Eemeeshee's nose was over a foot long.
The end of his nose turned up in a sickle
from the weird growth that had distorted
him — due to the peculiar rays of the
ancient machine in which he lived. Eeemee-
shee's head was vast and horrible too, and
his body was a mass of flesh too vast to
worry about any more and Eemeeshee
hardly thought of his appearance. It was
not important. Few things were important
to Eemeeshee.

The growth rays of the machine in which
he sat, and which had kept him alive
through the slow drag of the centuries while
he dreamed away his too numerous life-
times, had made him grow unaccountably
in some ways — in others not at all. His
face was seamed and lined, yet the flesh
was soft and pink as a baby's flesh. He
belonged to a race unknown to surface
man!

Long ago, his ancestors had found that
certain machines of the God caverns, if one
remained within them, kept one alive cen-
tury after century. And the living in them
was very pleasant, too.

The magic of the Gods who had built
them gave to one endless dreams at the
touch of a button. Endless dreams of love,
of Goddess-like women, of glory and war
and conquest. In fact, one had only to
think when one had punched the dream
button, and whatever one wished became
a reality in a dream more vivid than ever
was reality.

That family had few children. The
dream life does not make for that. But
some they did have, and servants by the
score. So that wherever one of the great
living machines was to be found, there was
found one of the strange and ancient dwell-
ers within. The men of the surface once
worshipped these invisible listening ears,
for they might be persuaded to do great
magic for one, if one asked them correctly
— and frequently.

SOFTLY Eemeeshee turned from the lis-
tening place, his heavy breathing sough-

96

AMAZING STORIES

ing in the augmentive apparatus like a
great wind. If he had had the rays turned
upward, he would have been heard like a
great spirit of the winds, breathing in the
skies, and that was why he was called the
Breath-Master, because he did not shut off
the intake of the augmentor, and was al-
ways heard breathing. Perhaps he did not
know it could be shut off. He turned on
the searching eye rays, looked about up on
the slowly darkening surface in the eve-
ning calm. All was different up there than
it had once been, long ago when he had
watched the red men fight their wars. Their
war-whoops had once been given in conflict
even down in the cavern world. Long cen-
turies had Eemeeshee sat, and his father
had sat there before him. Eemeeshee did
not know if he was a God or not, but he
supposed it must be so; had not men wor-
shipped the Eemeeshees for an age?

Eemeeshee wondered a bit where all the
Indians had gone, and who these pale peo-
ple with their ugly machinery and railroads
and square houses might be who had taken
over all the land above of late. He had
not paid much attention to the upper world
for a long time. Time didn't matter much
anyway. Old Eemeeshee did not care
greatly about the actual world. To him it
was like an unwanted program on the tele-
visor; too commercial to listen to: like the
radio in the house of a person who does
not approve of the commercially raucous
sounds it emits. Eemeeshee seldom looked
at the upper world. He only half believed
in it, anyway. Dreams were much more
real, and far more beautiful. The dream
world into which his dream device plunged
him was vastly more satisfying. Was it
not more vivid, more full of sweet sound
and pleasant sensation and mightier peo-
ple and vastly stronger love? Eemeeshee
was not in love with the world of the ac-
tual above his head.

Eemeeshee seldom talked to mere men.
There were too many interesting characters
in the library of wire film which furnished
his dream mech with material, Too, the
dream mech made these people real and
when one asked them questions or talked
to them, they answered. They were vast-
ly more pleasing than mere people of the
world over head. Certainly the dream
world was one to live in; it rewarded him
for every effort with an infinitude of pleas-
ures.

There were few living men who really

knew if Eemeeshee was a reality or a leg-
end from the past. One of these was the
chief of his servants. He kept the things
of the world from interfering with Eemee-
shee's pleasures. There was Saba, the
keeper of his women. Like all the great of
the cavern world, Eemeeshee was well sup-
plied with women, but he did not bother
them greatly. They lived altogether in the
women's quarters. Under Saba's clever
rule they kept busy and to themselves.
They were not important, and to Eemee-
shee, Saba was like a daughter; a daugh-
ter whom he protected from the ugly world
of reality. It was better not to know how
worthless it was.

In truth, he badly neglected the lives of
the people around him, who waited on him
hand and foot and even loved him a little.
But, then, Eemeeshee was only a forgotten
legend, and their lives only a reflection of
the glories that had been the life of the
caverns when the Red Man was a power
on the earth above and had sent always
young blood down into the ancient dark-
ness to keep things alive and pulsing.

There was still a lot of life in Eemee-
shee's great body. But it was a life that
was not greatly interested in itself or in
anyone else, either. Eemeeshee was a vic-
tim of the greatest vice on earth, the rec-
ord-mech dreams of the Gods, and his
practical knowledge of life and his machines
or anything important to an ordinary man
was in truth elementary — extremely so.

## Chapter II

**CHAPTER II**

**The Red Men Meet**

FAR off from that hidden, forgotten
place where the old one cogitated the
vast mysteries of an existence he had never
bothered to understand, the meeting of the
Red Legion in the Law Offices of Eonee
Lane and Jack Stevens began.

Stevens sat down, and Lane continued
standing. In his hand was the paper
Stevens had given him. He began to talk
— low-pitched college English.

"A thing we have long suspected has
been confirmed. The rule in the hidden
places under Montana is no longer in the
hands of the Red Men. A swift surprise
attack gave the power into the hands of
foreign white conspirators. They have de-
luded us into thinking no change took place.
Lane handed the paper to the man seated

THE RED LEGION

97

next. The man looked at the paper a long
time. It was not easy for him to decipher
the Indian pictographs. Finally he nodded,
passed the paper on to the next. The paper
made the circuit of the room, returned to
Stevens.

"For you fellows who can't read the
ancient writing of our fathers — the picto-
graph come from one John Ahahne. Once
he was a high-placed warrior of the tribe
in power below. Now he is reduced to
bearing burdens on his back for the white
interlopers. The Indian has lost another
great battle with the white man. These
European ray people who have again begun
the ancient battle against the red man, have
wiped out the friendly white ray of the
east — and have now turned their attention
to the portions held from ancient times by
red men."

Stevens stopped, stared moodily at the
long table top. Lane's cultured voice went
on where Stevens had stopped.

"To the red men of the surface, who are
few enough and poor enough as it is — we
who have been taken into the ancient secret
only because we are few and because our
red skins created a bond of sympathy with
the red skins of the underworld — this
means that to prosper in the future we must
remove ourselves from this area to another
where the red man still holds the secret
caverns against the new threat."

As Lane ceased, one Ace Kitka spoke:

"There have been many deaths of red
men whom I know, of late. I have heard
voices threatening me with death, saying
that each day one Indian dies until there
are no more of us in all this area. I have
watched the papers, wondered whether the
voice in the night spoke true. It did speak
true; the red men are being killed by invisi-
ble rays. The deaths are usually heart
failure, according to the doctors' death
certificates. I have decided to leave Mon-
tana far behind myself. If you know what
is good for you, you will all go from here."

"Several of my intimate friends have
died lately," agreed Lane. "They died
apparently naturally: one run over by a
truck, one of pneumonia, one of a brain
hemorrhage. To us who know the power
of the ancient machines, we know that
these deaths are not accidents — when they
are accompanied by threats from the voices.
I, too, have heard the voice."

A deep voice from the back of the crowd
made itself heard.

"John Ahahne, a voice I have known
for many years, always speaks truth. If
he has given us warning that this is not
a place for red men, it is true. Ill luck
will dog us from the enmity of these
spiteful newcomers below. They are no
longer our friends; our friends are dead.
They are masquerading as our friends
while they bring about our destruction.
You know that almost always the men of
the caverns kill those who know the ancient
secret of their dwelling place. If these
new conquering ray practice that ancient
custom of guarding the secret of the rays,
we have no choice but to flee — and far."

A CHORUS of voices began to struggle
to be heard — agreeing, telling of ill
luck and deaths of friends and relatives.
Stevens raised a hand.

"That is enough. I see it is true. We
have been blind to think the ray people
below are still friendly as of old. Let us
leave this country, together, all of us, and
find a country where the underworld still
contains men friendly to us, or some of the
ancient ones to protect us."

One Lee Johnson thrust his lean over-
ailed body to the fore of the room.

"The main idea is to go where things
are good. Maybe the ray won't talk to us
other places, but they may leave us alone.
They may even help us get started again."

A FUNERAL caravan of motor cars left
Butte the next morning. In the long
line of cars were some fifty men, their
wives and families. Others were leaving
singly for locations of their own choosing.
Their belongings were lashed to the sides
and tops of the cars. In the hearse was
the latest of the dead of the Red Legion.
He had died in the night of a "hemor-
rhage, cause unknown," The white men
watched the funeral caravan uncompre-
hendingly.

"Looks like our Indians are turning
gypsy, or something. Funny they'd take
all that stuff on a funeral trip. Wonder
what the police have to say about it?"

"Guess they got a right to leave if they
want to. It's when they decide to stop
their troubles will begin. There are a lot
of Indian laws that Lane and Stevens
know plenty about and they are. in that
line. Must know what they're doing with
these two along. They got a hearse in
the line. May be a smart trick to avoid

98

AMAZING STORIES

bother with the law, eh?"

"Yeh, it's funny so many Indians would
get ready for a long trip thataway. They
could be taking a dead one to some special
place to bury him, I guess."

"Been a lot of Indians dying lately.
Nearly every day I read something about
a dead Indian. Maybe they're wiser than
we think."

"Could be, could be . . ."

"Indians around Butte here have always
had a reputation for knowing what's com-
ing next. There's always been something
mysterious about it. Never could figure
it out. Maybe that is more than a funeral
and maybe it ain't. Well never know. I'll
bet a dime we never see those Indians
again, though."

Similar conversations could have been
heard along the highway leading out of
Butte. But nobody thought of asking the
Indians what it was all about.

That night, as the long caravan made
camp, they dug a grave for Ace Kitka.
His weeping wife and two papooses; the
solemn faces of the men of the caravans;
the grim knowing that the road into the
dark deathland gaped for all of them in
this land of the white man just as it had for
their ancestors was a terrible thing. To
know that every day one of them must
die . . . Why? The aching hearts asked
and asked the bewildered minds and there
was no answer. Just the unseen threat,
the knowing that it was the ancient secret,
killing again as it always had in the past.
Killing, killing . . . Why must the secret
always be the reason for death instead
of the key to greatness for all men as it
should be? Their eyes raised to the dark-
ening sky for a sign from the great father,
for the "breath" of the "master," for
some hope from the beneficence of the
unseen. But only the grim knowledge
that every day one of them must die an-
swered them. Their ancient Gods gave
no other sign that night.

Each night, as they drove slowly south-
ward, one grave was dug, one strong young
brave, dead, was placed in the earth. Their
prayer implored Eemeeshee to speak again
as he had when the exodus was decided
upon, but Eemeeshee did not answer.
Hampered by the number of aged, wornout
cars, the children, the old women, they
drove sldwly, keeping together for mutual
aid when needed.

## Chapter III

**CHAPTER III**

**A New Home**

When they reached that part of the
great American desert where the
Humboldt sinks into the sands — that day
they had no grave to dig! Gravely Lane
looked at Stevens.

"Here in this desert must be our home.
Here something keeps the curse of the daily
death from us. Under our feet within the
ancient rock some power for good still
lives on. If we pass on, the deaths will
begin again. For the evil ray people are
single-minded; once set upon a course such
as our deaths they don't stop until we are
all dead. You know that. Upon the
other side of this invisible influence, they
will follow and kill us again."

"You may be right. It is hard to under-
stand. They are not like men; the people
of the underworld. They are not civilized
like ourselves. It is hard to understand
their slaying and cruelty, their dogged
persistence in such cursing of surface men
with death. But we know it is so."

A leaning sign post pointed off along a
little used desert trail. "YUKA" said the
sign, noncomittally. But there were scrib-
bled Indian writings under the word, writ-
ings that only an Indian could read.

The forty cars that were left of the fifty
that had started turned off the concrete
into the dusty road. The wind blew
hotly, lonesomely, across the wide, yellow
waste. Mournfully the stolid faces looked
at each other, knowing how the other's
heart was hurting at this turning to the
desert from their loved homes.

They had sold the cars that had broken
down, and those of their dead they did not
need and put the money into the common
pool. Lane knew their only hope was to
face their troubles with complete unity.

THAT night they sat within the lodge
of Secumne in his desert fastness.
There were now but twenty-five young
men, and some dozen aged men. Some of
them were veterans, but they knew better
than to go to the military with their tale.
For all of them knew no white man
understood the ancient secret — not to
openly admit it anyway. They thought
all white men cowards never to discuss the
ancient secret. (But in truth white men

THE RED LEGION

99

have been carefully taught that "voices
are insanity"; never to believe such silly
tales. And that is hard to understand
when one has been raised to respect and
fear the ancient underworld.) The women
and children were not admitted to the
council.

Yuka had once been quite a large mining
camp. Then it had been called Crockett,
after the famous Indian fighter. After its
brief hey-day it had been a ghost town
for a long time. Now it was "Yuka," a
new name for its score of falling down
frame shacks.

Secumne had taken the biggest shack.
It had once been a bar-room. Now it was
hung with Indian blankets, an open fire
burned, weapons hung on the walls and
the pelts of game. Secumne sat on a chair
draped with a sheep pelt across the back.

A dozen leading men of the tribe squatted
behind Secumne. Old wrinkled ones,
younger eagle-eyed sturdy ones. Stevens
and Lane squatted directly in front of
the old chief. Behind, filling the shack,
squatted or stood the twenty-five young
men who survived.

Stevens smoked the long pipe, passed it
to Lane. When the pipe had finally re-
turned to Secumne, he took it in one thin
hand, puffed it contentedly. There was
plenty of time.

Lane handed Secumne the little paper
on which John Ahahne had scribbled the
pictograph message. The old man looked
at it briefly, frowned, nodded, returned it.
To make sure Secumne understood, Lane
interpreted the message at length.

"The message is what started us away
from Butte. Chance has brought us to
you. Can you help us; tell us of your
knowledge of the secret. What we must
know to find a place that is safe for us?
Your trail signs told us you would aid
men of the Red Legion."

The old man looked very stupid. He
looked at them a, long time. Finally the
wrinkled, toothless old mouth began to
talk.

"What you should know takes much
telling. Not many you could find would
have any information for your company.
The Gods have brought you to me." The
old man spoke good English. He must
have been in an Indian school, long ago
when young.

The company of men from Butte waited.

To an outsider they looked like deeply
tanned white men, in white men's clothes.
But inside those clothes and that lean,
rangy flesh, inside those tall silent young
Americans burned the ancient fire that
made the red man the feared warrior that
he was. On those faces that savage cour-
age and hardihood of the Indian sat, at
home. They waited. The old one would
take his time. The voice finally went on.

"You have prayed to Eemeeshee, the
Breath-Master. He has answered you. I
know that is true, for you have told me,
and I can see you are not all liars. It has
not happened for many years that Eemee-
shee talked with his children. It seems that
the ancient one has awakened, then. So I
have much to tell you. If it had not
been that you told me of your invocation to
Eemeeshee — I would have little to say to
you. But that is good, that Eemeeshee
still answers his chosen. Now I must tell
you what Eemeeshee is, and you must
listen and understand me and believe.
Even these who have known me many
years, my own people, many of them
would not believe what I am going to say.
But if you wish to save yourselves from
the fate that has dogged you here, you
must believe me."

The old man stopped, looked at them,
sounding them for unbelief, for scorn of
his words. Finding only an attention and
respect in their faces, he went on.

"You see, Eemeeshee is a man. He is
many hundred years old. His father was
still older when he died. I have been to
Eemeeshee J s lodge, deep under earth. I
have seen him."

"X^OU have seen our ancient God?"

* Lane rose to his feet, excitement not

letting him sit still.

"He exists in truth? Then all our
fathers' teachings are not lies, as the whfte
men tell us?"

"The white men are overwise some-
times. They 'know everything' because
some teacher who 'knows everything' told
them so, because they read a book that
told them what was true and what was
false. They believe they know many
things they do not know. The white men
are sometimes very foolish in their wis-
dom. Eemeeshee is not what they think.
But he is not what the Red Man thinks,
either. He is not a spirit! He is very

100

AMAZING STORIES

different from anything you can imagine."

"How, different?" Stevens had leaned
forward, watching Secumne's old face for
every change of expression. It was im-
portant that they be not misled by any
old dodderer. Their future depended on
what they did next. Perhaps on what the
old man might tell them depended the con-
tinuation or cessation of the daily deaths
among their company. Perhaps the whole
fate of the Red Legion, of thousands of
Indians spread over half the continent —
the whole Red Legion — depended on this
old man's words. Stevens, too, knew there
was a mighty thing to learn about such
manifestations. This old one had seen
him. That was important.

The old man went on.

"He is different from men, but yet only
a man. In some ways he is perhaps much
less than a man."

About the old chief some forty intent
faces pressed closer, anxious not to miss
one quavering word. Truth was in the
old man's face, and he knew facts that
few other living men knew about the great
mystery of life: the Gods that men have
worshipped and believed in always.

"Where he is, under earth, you have
never seen. It is a world vastly different
from our own world of sunshine and nat-
ural plant growth. Only many years of
experience can give a man understanding
of why things are as they are there. So
much I will tell you will have to be taken
as truth though it may not seem truth.

"Long, long ago — when there were no
white men in all the American continent —
the red men of the very far past found the
ancient caverns of an Elder race. There
in the caverns whole tribes lived and died
and fought — and learned a magic never
known by surface people. The Indian
medicine man of those days was one who
had gone to those underworld red men and
learned magic — and returned to his people
to teach. They learned there how to work
for the unseen red men — and the remnants
of their teachings, surviving in your ignor-
ant modern minds, have brought you to
this pass; have somehow brought you to
me. I am the last of that kind of medicine
man. There are no others that I know of.
I am older than you think. For I lived
a long time underground. And when I
came out I found my friends had aged
much more than myself. The custom of

those days — of red men underground help-
ing and teaching surface red men — has
survived, even though so much time and
disaster and miles of rock lie between the
brothers. To you Eemeeshee is a god, only
a lengendary figure of the dark and ignor-
ant past. If he is in existence, you think
he is mysterious, powerful, unknowable;
a kind of super ghost."

The old man paused, smiled condescend-
ingly as upon foolish children. His smile
was very sweet, he was an old, a good
man, it said. One whom time had taught
that only goodness and kindness are wis-
dom. His voice went on, a kind of mildly
savage chant in the half-dark.

"But to me, who have seen him, talked
to the ancient one, lived with him and
served him, he is a timid thing, a mis-
understood character, a vast mountain of
useless and undying flesh."

The faces of the grim young men who
had fled mysterious death that cut them
down day by day — drew back at these
words, puzzled, disappointed. They knew
not what to say. Their breath sounded
like a sigh in unison as the tension let up.
But old Secumne went on, unnoticing, his
eyes musing on things they could not know.

"EEMEESHEE is timid, as a long-
necked clam is timid, as a prairie
dog is timid, as a turtle is timid.

"Eemeeshee has a shell. He pokes out
his head. If everything is not the way the
mind of him would like it, he pulls his
head in, and a year goes by before he
looks again. The last time — half a century
went by, so I have heard. But it was not
that long. I am not that old. And I
know him. Perhaps he has poked his
head out every year.

"Eemeeshe's forefathers have lived in
such shells until it is as necessary physi-
cally to him as is the actual turtle's shell.
Eemeeshee never comes out of his shell.
His people have lived in such machines
always. Eemeeshee belongs to a very
ancient family who have always lived as he
is doing. It is his way — and that way
is not as we know men's ways. To us,
Eemeeshee is not a man. He can not live
without his shell, that is a machine."

Lane stirred, rose from his haunches.

"That is very strange talk, Secumne.
To some, what you say would not make
sense. But we know something of what

THE RED LEGION

101

you speak. We know a few^acts about
the underworld. We would know more of
this 'shell' of Eemeeshee's. Has Eemeeshee
power? Can we go to him, as you have
gone in the past? Will he teach us, help
us to fight for the Red Legion? Will he
show us how to work for the rights of the
red men to life and a place to live? Will
he help to make us strong again? These
are the things we would know."

"I would tell you all these things. But
it takes time, and words are very poor
things with which to speak of things that
the makers of the words did not know.
It would be better if I took you straight
to Eemeeshee myself. Then you would
learn the answers to your questions and
know the answers were true. I would not
encourage you too much. But you are
modern men. Things about Eemeeshee
and his shell and about the wonders of the
underworld may provide your minds with
tools that to me would be useless. I am
not a modern."

"You will take us to him, then?"

"Yes, my friends, I understand what
you want. If it is not there where Eemee-
shee still lives within his shell — it is no-
where! "

For a long time the group sat, staring
into the flickering embers, waiting for the
old man to talk. Now and then he would
go on, then lapse into silence again.

"Eemeeshee has sat within a weird ma-
chine which he nor his fathers ever under-
stood — and has not moved. The machine
has fed him, protected him from all harm.
It is that kind of machine. And all that
time he has sat in possession of that fear-
ful power which he has only occasionally
used, according to legend. All that time
the red men of earth were driven across
the continent, have nearly vanished from
earth. And Eemeeshee sat on, lazily pay-
ing no attention while his worshipping peo-
ple died and vanished. He does not really
think! But when we pray, sometimes
Eemeeshee's (the machine's) long ears
are out, and he hears the prayers of his
red children. It is like the white man's
radio; it hears across vast distances. But
it hears only thoughts. And he cocks up
these ears, sometimes, and then when he
understands, he answers. Not because he
wants to, understand. But because the
mechanism of the machine makes the heard
thought so strong that his own weak
thought must obey. So we answer our-

selves when we know how by making
Eemeeshee hear us. Then, if it makes him
work for five minutes, he is tired. He
shuts off the machine; he is through. He
may not turn the power into the magic
ears for days, months or years. For he is
not a thinker, this 'God' of ours. Those
mighty things he could have done for the
red men, he has not done, for he had no
wish to do anything."

"WHY is he like that?" Lane's eyes
were filled with the mysterious
meaning of the old man's words, for Lane
knew enough to know it could be so, exactly
as Secumne said!

"Because Eemeeshee is a dreamer. A
maker of his own dreams, and a dreamer
of other's dreams, too. That machine in
which he has lived so long no man knows
when he entered — that machine can make
dreams for the worm within it. It can also
make those dreams one thinks one would
like to dream — make them into vivid intri-
cate and perfect patterns of life. Eemee-
shee cannot read or write, has no knowledge
of life. He has never worked, never moved
a muscle except to please himself with the
intricate pleasures of the living machine.
He is not a man. He is a feeble creature
of pleasure — a great bag of almost immortal
flesh that lacks all interest in life as we
live it. We are just the overhead scenery
with him, which he can look at or not — as

Stevens gave a long whistle.

"That is a revelation, Secumne. These
new white ray from Europe who have
conquered the cavern under Butte — are
they like Eemeeshee? The white ray peo-
ple of the east who have left the Indians
in possession of their own caverns in the
west — were they like Eemeeshee before
they died at the European hands?"

"I cannot say these things for certain
that you ask, O Son of Courage. I can
say what I have heard whispered by the
voices in the night. But you know how
the voices lie to us; pretend to be spirits;
pretend that everything they know is a
secret and that only lies can be told us
of the surface. You know how mad the
voices are. Yet there are voices that are
not mad — that are like your John Ahahne
— good and smart men of the underearth."

"Go on. What have the voices said?"

"The voices sometimes say that this
white newcomer ray people who have con-

102

AMAZING STORIES

quered the red man's last caverns are not
from Europe, but from space; from another
world where things are very different. That
they killed all the old friends of the people
on Earth's surface; all the long lived beings
like Eemeeshee within their life-machines;
and that now surface man has no real
friends any more under the rocks of earth.
Only corsairs from space, who seek only to
keep men ignorant and weak. But I do
not believe it, for the voices seem so often
to be like European voices: men who have
learned English well, but are yet Euro-
peans; Continentals. But all the voices
agree that the leaders of these rays, every-
where, are too often mad. The people who
have the control rays are mad, do not think
at all of anything but their own pleasure,
can not even think effectively of precau-
tions for their own safety."

"There are many such as Eemeeshee left,
do you think?"

"No, my friend. I think that even
Eemeeshee is alive only by accident. I
thing that most of his kind, his feeble,
peculiar race of men-within-a-machine-shell
has been nearly killed off by the newcomers
in the caverns."

"These newcomers could well be from the
surface, who have introduced modern gang-
ster methods into the strange cavern
world."\*

"No, the reports of them are too peculiar.
They contend they do not think as men.
Or do not think at all. Just pleasure and
cruelty."

"Lazy, like Eemeeshee, but in a different
way, eh?"

"That is right. Now, if you don't mind
— since we are starting in the morning for
the place I spoke of, and I am an old man —
I must go to bed. All your questions will
be much better answered by the actuality
than by my words. Once down there you
will learn these things."

"I suppose you are right. I would rather
see this immortal Eemeeshee than to hear
about him — if he is as harmless as you
say."

"He is not exactly harmless. But he has
no will to slay anyone in particular; no
reason to harm you. Eemeeshee can fight
quite well or he would not be alive."

"Well however it may be — goodnight."

\* It is a peculiarity of the caves that there is a
weird mixture of ancient and modern. Imitation
of ancient dress is amazingly authentic. — Ed.
## Chapter IV

**CHAPTER IV**

**The Finding of Eemeeshee**

A LL the next day six cars drove across
the desert. There was little or -no
visible trail but they were following an
ancient forgotten road, and the cars found
it not too difficult. Old Secumne, toward
the close of the day, indicated a stepping
place. The cars drew up in a line, facing
the wall of a canyon. There was no partic-
ular reason for stopping that Lane could
see.

Darkness was on them when the evening
meal was finished. Secumne rose from the
fire, walked to the canyon wall. From his
blanket roll he had taken a little flute. Now
he blew three notes upon the flute. A high
one, a low one, and one soft in between
in pitch.

A vast muffled rumble answered from
within the wall of rough rock. Slowly a
great section tipped, swiveling slowly out-
ward, pivoting on its center. Exposed on
both sides of the balanced section of rock
was a tunnel, wide enough, big enough for
four motor cars- abreast. Two cars could
have driven in on each side of the pivoted
rock. The tunnel led down as far as their
lights reached. Lane stood, overcome by
the magnitude of this proof of the old
Indian's words. Hearing of such things
was one thing, seeing them quite another.

"Who built such a thing?"

"It is the work of the ancient ones who
built all through the under-rock of earth.
No one knows words to describe or name
them today. But presently I will show you
wall pictures of their tremendous beauty
and strength. They were giant men. There
are few such doors left any more. This
one has been protected from erosion by
circumstances. Too, in times not too long
past, our own forefathers, the red men who
served such as Eemeeshee, chipped away
the stone, kept the door open, protected
and cared for it. Unless such care goes
on the door will be lost forever. Such has
happened to many doors into the under-
world. One by one they disappear for-
ever. But of late years, the voices tell me
there are many new openings being made."

"It doesn't seem possible that time would
leave such a thing intact to operate."

"Men have spent much time and labor
upon it. See how earthen bulwarks have

THE RED LEGION

103

been built to keep the water from flowing
here. How the rocks that might fall and
block it have been cleared away above.
Once there were many hands to serve the
fathers of Eemeeshee, and Eemeeshee, if
he had had the mind to use them. But
such as he have little mind to use people."

Old Secumne's voice was filled with a
strange weariness, as though the contem-
plation of the facts about such creatures
as the Indian God Eemeeshee was very

As the cars trundled into the smooth
roadway, picked up speed, Lane asked
Secumne:

"How is it that Eemeeshee has survived
the death you think has caught up with
his like in other places?"

"He is not easy to kill. Too, he is not
feared, for he is peculiar, timid. They are
used to having such as him about. It is
not wise to try to kill such as the old one
without necessity. They sometimes know
mighty things, which they do not use until
someone arouses them from their dreams."

"Finding that the legendary Gods have
had a real existence, and that something
that was once worshipped as a God still
lives on when all belief in such existence
has disappeared, is a disappointment. I
suppose all Gods everywhere in the cen-
turies past have been just such creatures."

"They have not all been like Eemeeshee,
no! But many have. Others, I learned
long ago, do not exist, but are imitated by
people in the caverns for no reason but
custom and mischievousness. But to tell
men anything about such subjects I have
always found nearly impossible. It is good
to find that the Red Legion itself is not a
legend, but a reality. It is good to know
that the Legion has many members, knows
enough to realize that the old tales had a
truth about them, a mighty truth."

THE cars wound down and down. Driv-
ing was no task, the road was broad,
straight and level except for a gradual and
hardly noticeable curve, and level as new
laid concrete. Here and there slight shifts
of the rock strata had raised bumps, sudden
steps, where a drop or a raise had taken
place, but usually these were easily nego-
tiable as the unevenness had been filled
at some time in the past with rubble.

As the way led deeper and deeper into
the earth, these shiftings of the rock grew

less and less. At last they disappeared
altogether.

"How far to the old one?" Stevens leaned
toward Secumne, sitting in the back seat
with Lane. His dark, aquiline face was
intent, curious.

"Couple hours yet. Can't drive fast,
can't tell. Maybe rock fall, maybe barri-
cades put up since. Haven't been here for
twenty years now."

Lane spoke to Stevens.

"Just what do we expect to get out of
him, anyway. Hadn't we better discuss
what we are going to say to him, and then
let Secumne do the talking? He knows the
ancient rigamaroles by which such beings
are propitiated. It isn't as if we were going
to discuss a point of law with a judge on
the bench, you know. We don't really
have much idea what we're trying to do."

Stevens looked at Secumne.

"When we get there, you try and arouse
some feeling in the old one for the red
man and his struggle to remain — to grow
great again in his own way. Tell how the
white man has displaced us while our
guardian, Eemeeshee has dreamed away the
life that should have been devoted to pre-
serving the Indian and his way of life, his
racial culture and attainments. Tell him
that now is his last chance to be what his
children have always thought him to be.
Try and arouse some spark in his heedless
heart. Then, if you see life in his brain and
a regard for the red man, tell him we belong
to a legion — the last organized red men on
the continent. That we will bring members
of the legion here to learn from him the
way of the Elder Gods. That he must only
teach. That if there is fighting to be done,
we will do it for him. There is no need
for him to disturb his peace or come out
of his dreams. After he has taught one of
us we will guard him and serve him while
we teach the others ourselves. Under-
stand?"

"I catch. I'll tell him what he should
have been told a hundred years ago — a
hundred and fifty — or what his father
should have known three hundred years
ago."

The cars were now passing the gray dust-
shrouded shapes of the wonder work of the
Elder race, but old Secumne gave no sign
of calling a halt. Steven's eyes darted
right and left, watching the dust-covered
mystery that was the machinery of a

AMAZING STORIES

science now lost from earth. A tremendous
emotion was aroused in him as he realized
what there was here for his people that
had been denied them by the ignorance of
such as Eemeeshee, and of such as Secumne.
He turned to the old man.

"Why have' you never brought any of the
educated young men of your tribe here?
Why have you hidden this knowledge of
yours for your people?"

"When I was younger," answered the old
man sadly, "I tried to do those things you
have in mind. The young men laughed
at me! I tried very hard, brought some
men here to show them. All went well till
they saw the body and terrible appearance
of Eemeeshee. Then they laughed, or
swore, or fled. They could not think right
of the ancient one and he grew angry, slew
some, chased the others away. They had
not the vision or courage. I have waited
all my life for seekers such as you. Now
you have come. I warn you, Eemeeshee
knows your thought. Try and think cor-
rectly, or your efforts will end in failure.
Eemeeshee is not such a man as you and I.
His heredity is very different."

"You mean to say you brought educated
young Indians here and they took no ad-
vantage of what there is here to be learned
— to be used for our race? Explain!"

"Some few of them did learn what it all
meant. They tried to lead others, to teach
as you plan. But they failed to convince
others, became at last discouraged and
bitter as I have become. Men are very
foolish. They cannot believe in anything
that is greater than their school books.
Sometimes I think it were better had they
never gone to school! It closed their minds
to all greater truths. They have refused me.

"They have refused the wisdom of the
underworld and of the past because their
teachers did not tell them of it in their
school books. So they knew it could not be.
I got tired of being laughed at. I took my
women and my children and moved here to
this place where you have found me. I am
very tired of life."

Stevens nodded grimly.

"I think we may find a remedy for your
difficulties. Some men told me of you when
I was quite young. They did not laugh.
You have been laughed at in public; but
those who did not laugh have believed you
without talking about it very much. Now
we have it again: a door to the ancient
secret. We knew this thing was true, but

the entrances were closed to us. We did
not know how to lay our hands on the
ancient mech. We did not know an open
entrance.

THE tall, white figure in the roadway
waved them to a halt. He was white as
a fish's belly, but his features were purest
Indian, with a great hawk nose, wide
nostrils, high cheekbones — and a lean,
starved, greyhound body. His limbs were
bone thin under the long white ceremonial
robe. He was very old, but somehow vig-
orous. His words were purest Quemaya,
and only Secumne understood the almost
extinct tongue well.

"Welcome to the ancient realm of the
Breath-Master. It has been long since pil-
grims have found their way to their God.
Give me your names that I may acquaint
the mighty one with your presence and
learn if he will grant you sight of his glory."

Secumne answered gravely in the same
tongue.

"We are Pilgrims come bearing news and
asking for the aid of the great one. We
have much to give, and we may receive
much. Our news is for the ears of the
great one only. He may remember my
name: I was a servant here in the days,
long ago, of my youth. I am Secumne. He
may also know the names of these two, for
they know that Eemeeshee is a real being.
They are Jack Stevens and Eonee Lane.
They represent a great legion of red men,
the last of our once mighty race who still
preserve courage to plan for the future of
the Indian. It will be a mighty pleasure
to Eemeeshee to know that his red sons
still need him, still want his leadership and
his wisdom. Tell the Breath-Master that
if our fathers had sought and found the
way to his home that we would not now
need his help. For he would not have
turned his face away from his red sons.
Tell him, too, we bring him news of danger
to his life from other beings who have come
to the caverns of the Gods of the past.
They will kill him, if he does not know they
come, does not cease his mighty dreaming
and look at the world at his feet."

The tall, white-robed, skeletoh-thin In-
dian turned and walked away through a
vast doorway in the boring that was the
road. The eight men got out of the cars;
built a fire; began to prepare a meal: Little
was said. There was too much to say for
words to do their duty.

THE RED LEGION

105

Lane sat by the fire, waiting for the wom-
en to complete the cooking. He heard a
faint scuffling behind. He turned slowly,
and a cold fear of the unknown struck into
him.

Gazing at him not three feet away was a
face. A face belonging to a great white
spider! Twenty feet those thin white
limbs extended, that little round body
poised upon the fragility, looking at him
with a human face. The huge black eyes,
hanging long hair, the straggly pale beard
of ivory yellow, the body which was like a
man's if a man had been stretched
magically across a twenty-foot span and
left to live on that way. Lane could only
stare and lick his dry lips. He could not
speak.

The long, so much too long, thin arm
reached out, touched Lane's cheek cau-
tiously, almost caressingly. The fingers,
three times a normal man's finger length
and three times a man's fingers in thinness,
in fragility, felt slowly, carefully over his
face, touched his hair, his shirt, his hand.
Satisfied, the towering, thin height eased
slowly to a squatting position.

Then, the great round eyes watching
Lane, the long arm reached out fifteen feet
away, dipped quickly into the cooking pot,
snared a bit of boiled meat out of the hot
liquid, burned its fingers. The mouth
opened to a round pink 0, then let out a
shrill yip like a hurt puppy.

The incongruous life sat there, unnoticed
by the others, sucking its long fingers and
eyeing Lane speculatively. Lane spoke.

"You speak English? Who are you?"

The wide, too round eyes looked puzzled
at Lane, clicked its tongue. "Tch tch." But
it did not answer.

"Secumne! Come here!" Lane did not
call loudly, his voice might startle the
strange visitor.

THE old man rose from his place by the
farther fire, come slowly through the
dark. He stood, his stolid, lined old face
looking at the visitor.
"Tch tch," said Secumne.
"Tch thcheeee. Chee tch tech. Tch."
"What do you have to say about this?"
Lane asked.

"This is one of the lost of the caves.
His people did not use the ancient rays to
stay healthy, the conditions of the dark
caverns have made his race, bit by bit, year
by year and century'by slow century, into

what you see. He is to a man what a
potato sprout in a dark cellar is to a potato
plant in the hot sun. He is what is called
a 'creep, a spider man.' He is not stupid,
but he does not speak any real language.
The tongue has no more than a hundred
meanings. 'Food, water, sleep, wakewell,
ill'; such sounds are all you need to learn
to talk to 'Tch Tch'."

Lane did not answer. He only looked at
Tch Tch. So 'the ever-dark had made this
out of man?

Far off, down in the dim cavern road,
Lane could see other tall white spider
shapes, standing still — or moving swiftly
on their incredible stick-like limbs. It was
hard to realize that their parents had been
men like himself, some centuries before.
Hard to realize how very greatly it is true
that environment determines the organism
and its shape and nature so definitely, so
absolutely.

The soft old voice of Secumne mur-
mured:

"This one, Tch Tch, is the leader. The
leader is always named Tch Tch. Mostly
they do not have names. They are really
but a kind of intelligent animal entirely
indigenous. to the caverns."

Lane turned to Secumne a face on which
was written the beginning of that awe that
was going to claim him utterly before he
had learned but a minute part of what the
caves could teach. That awe of the in-
finite nature of energy and her products
that is to surface man hidden by the every-
day humdrum activity, by the limited num-
ber of the works of nature that modern
man observes. The terrific majesty of the
cavern works, built by the hands of a race
so superior as to be not really men at all,
but Gods, would dispel forever the limiting
bonds his puny life-experience had placed
upon Lane's mind. It is a potent alchemy
for a healthy mind; the revelations the cav-
erns have to offer.

Even as Lane turned to gaze again into
the fire and try to quiet his throbbing
thought into sanity in spite of the mighty
truths his deduction was presenting to his
trained, logical mind; even as he composed
himself and strove to pull his mind back
from the gulfs which it was leaping, from
the gorging of its hunger upon the mighty
meaning circumstance had laid before it . . .

... a soft shuffle of sandaled feet behind
him brought with their sound an alien per-
fume, a rustle and a sensing that is to

iOG

AMAZING STORIES

virile man irresistible, that which that black
magic of Mother Earth's ancient devising
sends the blood leaping through the body
shouting, "woman, woman!"

Lane whirled, crouched on his heels as he
was, to see moving toward him from the
dark the white, unmistakable form of a
woman of normal size and remarkable ap-
pearance. She was not dressed in the long
funereal garments which the skeleton-thin
servitor of Eemeeshee had worn. Instead
a brief fringed and beaded loincloth was
her sole attire — except for a collar of rich
Indian bead work resting upon her shoul-
ders. So must have looked the women of
his ancestral line, centuries ago before the
white man came, as they moved to the
marriage rites clothed in beauty and cour-
age and becoming feminine humility and
finding it covering enough.

THE pale face with its too large black
eyes came closer to Lane, and one by
one the men looked up at her and stared,
their eyes fixed upon her as by magnetism
polarized. Lane rose, and the blood leaped
through him. The woman smiled. An
eerie something gripped Lane. He bowed
on one knee, something that he had never
done. Her voice came to him then, a
sultry, smiling voice, full of little under-
tones and an understanding of men.

"You are the one named Eonee Lane.
The Master has sent me to bring you and
the one named Stevens to him. The Mas-
ter is greatly interested that you should
find your way to him still— when the men
of the surface have forgotten him for so
long."

"We are very interested, too. And who
do we have the honor of addressing?"

"My name is Saba. I am called the
Keeper of the Women. I am very glad you
have come." There was an accompaniment
of subtle meaning to her remark that Lane
was not sure he heard or imagined. It was
quite possible that she was glad to meet
men from the surface if the thin robed
skeleton who had met them first was a
criterion of the men of the caverns. Or if
"Tch Tch" was a sample of the manhood
hereabout.

She turned and led off into the dark,
and Lane and Stevens followed her. The
women of the party turned their dark
eyes upon the departing form of Saba wist-
fully. She was so much a woman it was
hard to have one's man send his eyes after

her realizing that themselves were so much
less than Saba.

Lane and Stevens followed the supple
silhouette through the half dark.

"Into the mysterious 'shell' of the ancient
god — the 'Breath-Master'," thought Lane.
"Now we will see what the 'mighty power'
so many of my ancestors have worshipped
really is."

Down a long winding ramp Saba led
them, never looking back, her ears telling
her of their movement. A light glow lamp
in her hand was the only light. Apparently
Saba carried it for their benefit, for she did
not appear to look at her surroundings,
seemed to know her way in the utter dark-
ness, seemed to move, like a bat, by the echo
of the sounds from the surroundings. Lane
and Stevens followed the tiny glow in her
hand, trusted to luck and to Saba that all
was well.

Quite abruptly they were no longer in a
dark cavern, but had entered the titanic,
brightly-lit luxury that is the God's home,
when it has been left intact. This place
had been treated kindly by Time, or had
been carefully preserved by endless work by
many hands through the centuries.

The walls were of crystal, a crystal that
was cut with gigantic incut line-carvings,
like Swedish cut-glass. Terrific figures of
the unequalled giant physique of the Elder
race moved across the transparent planes
of the walls in the breathtaking splendor
of form that is the Elder art work alone.
The great couches of spring metal were
thrown across with gleaming silk of blue,
worked in gold, while a swinging incense
burner exhaled a softening haze into the air,
a haze that was a too-exotic scent of the
Elder race's stores.

In the midst of this vaulting fabric of
stone and shining crystal and carved alien
figures and hazy air and utterly lonely
luxury sat Eemeeshee, an Eemeeshee who
was surrounded by a tremendous machine
built of crystalline plastic and gleaming,
glittering polished metals; or fluid flowing
colorfully through coils and tubes beneath
his feet; of glowing dials and leaping ener-
gies within vast cylinders before his eyes:
of^ many great cubical screen cavities
wherein the whole upper world might be
brought to focus. This machine in which
lay the great fat body of the motionless
Eemeeshee was the work of a Master of
the ancient machine art which has never
been on Earth since the Golden Age.

THE RED LEGION

107

EEMEESHEE turned his vast, horrible
head slowly upon them as Saba's san-
daled feet stuffed on the smooth plastic
of the floor. Within Lane's breast a ter-
rific fear of the unknown, an overwhelming
repulsion struggled to send him screaming
and shuddering back into the darkness
outside the alien luxury of this roost of
terror. For Eemeeshee was truly no longer
a man, if ever his race had been man. His
flesh lay within the crystal complexities
of the machine as though it were an ugly
dough kneaded by some alchemist into a
shape to frighten off the devil, and left
there by his own fearful hands refusing the
work. A great white sluggish pulsing thing,
surmounted by two vast pillars that were
his arms stretched out along the dial and
switch banks of the mechanism that was his
immortal home. And the face that he
turned on them as his sausage-like, two-
foot-long fingers ceased their slow spider-
ing glide along the instrument panel — that
face that surrounded those eyes was itself
enough to give a weak man instant mad-
ness. But the terror of the eyes was the
thing that held Lane and Stevens motion-
less though every instinct shouted "flee."
Those eyes that surmounted that vast twist
of white flesh and had watched the world
for unknown centuries, held all the weari-
ness and boredom; all the melancholy and
hopelessness; all the alien, cold unhuman
thought that is not thought as we know it.
All the things that man does not believe
in, were in those eyes. A lonely, terrible
ugliness of spirit sat in that . face. An
ugliness of spirit that is the lack of iden-
tity, of brotherhood, with any other living
thing. Lane read in the terrible face with its
foot-long nose hooked and sickeling up-
ward over the chin, that this being had
never realized there was a kinship between
him and any living thing. He was an alien
entity, whatever his antecedents may have
been. Eemeeshee did not speak, he only
looked incuriously upon the two young
Indian men, and his eyes inspected them
as one inspects a fly upon a window pane
with the utmost disinterest and careless
acknowledgement that the fly has life.
The ego that is man's normal possession
shrank within Lane, and a vast sensing of
cold aloneness came to him from Eemee-
shee.

Saba raised her voice in a long sing-song
of gibberish. It was an ancient language,
a parent to the Quemaya, but not one that

was understandable to either of them.
These awful eyes rested for a brief moment
on Saba, and Saba nodded and was gone.

They were alone with the terrible re-
gard of those alien, inhuman eyes. They
knew that he could read their thoughts of
him with the mech with which his fingers
slowly toyed. They knew that their
^thoughts of him were not complimentary,
but how can a man think differently of
what he sees than he does think? Lane
knew this thing was getting off on the
wrong foot, some way, but the key to
making of this meeting with Eemeeshee
anything but a terror was beyond him.

At last, when the long silence and slow
regard of the eyes was becoming unbear-
able,' a ray lanced softly down upon them
from the touch of his sausage-long finger
upon a dial, and a soft flood of thought
swept into them from Eemeeshee. A vast
understanding of this being flooded Lane
at this touch of the mind upon his own.
The thought queried softly, almost tim-
idly, "Who and what are you? What do
you want of Eemeeshee?"

Lane's spirits rose now. Mentally he

* resolved to make a real effort at being

understood. Carefully he began at the
beginning of their trouble in Butte; of
the Red Legion and what it meant; of what
they had been taught by the old men of
their tribe about Eemeeshee; of how In-
dians had always prayed to Eemeeshee and
had been rewarded with oblivion and a
futility of nonentity for their worship. All
these thoughts of themselves and what
they hoped Eemeeshee might do for them
mingled swiftly into a vast message to that
atrophied might.

LANE knew he was making an im-
pression, for a pale pink flush suffused
that colorless great moon of horribly flat-
tened flesh that was a face, the great nos-
trils opened a little, the lonely, world-
weary eyes lit up with interest and again
the meaning flowed into him from Eemee-
shee.

"What is this people's power who have
driven you forth, and why do you think
they're a threat to me?"

Lane leaped upon his opportunity.

"Eemeeshee, these alien ray people come
from afar, they have killed all the machine
dwellers wherever their rays have touched.
There is no reason to think they will not
kill you too, when they know where you

108

AMAZING STORIES

are and why they have not known of you
before."

"Who told you they killed the race of
the machine dwellers? Who told you these
people killed the Gods of the caves?"

"Has someone told you they did not
kill? They have killed many of the Red
Legion with no cause. Why should they
not try to kill you?"

"I have become tired of life. It might
be interesting if someone tried to kill me.
Tell me more of these people."

Lane told the great emotionless being
all that he knew of the newcomers to the
northern caverns. Softly, mildly, the great
face listened, the great lazy mind turned
the thoughts idly and visibly before Lane's
mental listening.

How to rouse the time-atrophied soul of
that great body? How to give him human
anger and human will to survive and create?
Lane's mind leaped and struggled and
wrestled with the problem. This great,
flat, twisted, lazy whiteness of flesh seemed
to Lane to typify, to be the whole race of
men who do not think or try to solve life's
problems, all the deadwood of the race of
man rolled into one great spirit and put -
there to dwell forever in a terrible enig-
matic punishment of one soul for all the sins
of omission of all men. How to rouse such
a devil of living nothingness into a God-
like fury of will toward creation and striv-
ing toward a greater, fuller life for all men?

How to fecundate that great thing with
the red flame of courage that burned, Lane
knew, in the men of the Red Legion? How
to make him desire to forward the real
purpose of life, to fight for them and their
goals understandingly and eagerly?

"Let me show you my men? Looking
into their minds, see their love for their
children, for the great legends of the red
men of the past, see their spirit seeking a
method to make a way of life for the red
man that will lead again to greatness as it
was before such as you turned their faces
from the red man and fell a-dreaming here
within your God-built machines. Think
what your duty toward your fellow men
may be. Think, Eemeeshee! These men
would fight to the death for you! Will you
lie down and die like a coward before the
coming of the evil thing that has killed
their brothers? Are you a coward, Eemee-
shee?"

Eemeeshee slowly turned the words with-
in his mind. His hand idly turned the

dials, and within the great cubical screens
Lane could see the small encampment of
his men where their fire burned beside the
great cavern road.

Slowly, one by one, Eemeeshee sent his
seeking telaug beam into each mind, read
there all the thoughts, looked idly at Lane
to note that he was watched as he did
what Lane suggested.

And even as Lane dared to hope that
the life in that mind might take fire from
the desperation of his followers; even as
Lane dared to send his mind along the
vision of what the future might be with
all the wisdom of this terrific being to guide
them . . . the enemy struck again!

A terrible ray lanced, searing and deadly,
down into that luxurious, lonely nest of
crystal and blue and gold in that chamber.
Struck, burning and smashing at the vast
white coils and ugly billows of soft flesh,
of ancient, pink-and-white life, struck rend-
ing at that soft vastness of Eemeeshee in a
frenzied effort to bring death quickly before
retaliation.

Lane fell to the floor, blinded and burnt
from the ray flashing past his head, and a
terrible odor of death, of burning flesh
filled the great quiet room that had seen
so much time go quietly by — and now this
had come to Eemeeshee.

## Chapter V

**CHAPTER V**

**Saba**

SABA was looking out upon the new-
comers. Knowingly, thoughtfully her
fertile, infinitely educated mind, revolved
the new thing — men — in her life. Since a
little girl she had spent all her waking
hours seeing that the needs and wishes of
the great Eemeeshee were filled. All the
sensuous desires of his wholly mental life
she had minded, too, making with her fer-
tile mind all the images he might desire to
watch augmented and developed into life
fullness in the solidographic dream mech.

All those antique records she had read
had given her avid young mind a food that
has not been properly given to man since
the Gods left the earth. She was vastly
more than mortal; she was what simpler
people call a white fairy, a sorceress. She
knew mighty things that could be done with
simple materials, she knew vast secrets of
energy and life and matter without really
realizing that she was superior to man. For

THE RED LEGION

109

all her time she was taken up ministering
to the greedy laziness that was the mind
of Eemeeshee. She had little time to think
of other things in her life except Eemeeshee
and his needs.

Now, suddenly, into her life of even
tenor, of fixed and, to her, perfect habits,
had come a turmoil of new factors. The
ways of her life, the wishes of her soul,
had that night turned into a new heated
channel. The tall, strong, and grim-faced
man, Lane, had made an impression on her
vital inner self; a self that had not faced
man in all reality, ever before. Only some-
times over the rays had she looked upon
men far overhead — and mostly their
thoughts were too simple and unbeautiful
to interest her.

Saba knew, now, that no more would she
content herself with knowing men from
afar over the rays. She realized that from
the fire of striving within the mind of the
tall grim strangers, fleeing before a rnys-
terior death, from the mind of Eonee
Lane, their leader, and within the mind
of the sleeker, stronger Stevens, that she
would no more be content with the lazy
emptf life and luxury of pandering to the
great appetite that ruled all this cavern,
Saba was taking stock of herself for the
first time in her life.

She had drifted with the calm currents
of events, events that never happened here
in the quiet dark, had accepted the half-
life of this place too easily. Something
had now been added which had trans-
formed her selfish, lazy reflection of Eemee-
shee's atrophied self-will to a sudden real-
ization that she had been letting life go by
while she too dreamed away everything
that life might be in the luxury of the
false sensing of what life was not of the
dream mech.

About Saba where she leaned against her
great old deliciously ornate vision mech in
thought, watching the scene of Lane and
Stevens before Eemeeshee, about her
slept or dawdled some two score other
women, of all ages. They were the harem
which Eemeeshee kept in deference to
custom among his kind, rather than for any
real need or desire he had for them. There
were few men in Eemeeshee's "court," for
Eemeeshee usually detested men and their
ambitions plaguing him to effort he did
not desire to make. He banished the chil-
dren of the place, if they were men, before
they came of an age to make trouble. The

old priest Watusojhe served as his advisor
and general factotum. A half-dozen youths,
children of the women, supposed to be
children of Eemeeshee, but in truth fath-
ered by the wanderers of the caverns —
those men who spend their lives searching
the endless labyrinths of the dark for the
treasures that they sell to the space ships
that come sometimes to certain customary
places for this purpose. (The age-old cus-
tom of secrecy of the caverns forbids trade
with surface men. Too, men of the sur-
face world have little to offer that cavern
people recognize as value. The rich, tre-
mendous value of the ancient profuseness
of productions of the vastly superior race
make the poor values of surface man of
little account.)

But Eemeeshee's solitary ways had given
these women of his a hunger for human
kind, and the strong youth and complex
thought of these newcome Indians of mod-
ern surface educated ways was to them a
wonderful thing. So it was that Saba and
several others were watching the encamp-
ment and the scene within the crystal cham-
ber over the ray mech, while the guard ways
— which of old custom were supposed to be
watched by someone always and which
reached for many miles to the four quarters
of direction — were now perfunctorily
watched from a distance. On the screens,
if they had looked, could have been seen
the great rolling ray weapons in their ray-
armored tanks sweeping nearer and nearer
from the north.

But Saba was not thinking of attack,
for there had been no attack in her life-
time.

Nor, in all Eemeeshee's centuries-old
memory, had she noted in her reading of
his mind any attack of importance for so
many, many years. When the blazing bolts
of energy flung themselves into Eemeeshee's
crystal nest, there was little they knew to
do about it. Warfare was the thing farthest
from their minds as well as from Eemee-
shee's thought.

■pVEN so, Saba had talked with the
wandering treasure hunters, and knew
a great deal about warfare by hearsay.
In anticipation of such attack she had
occasionally practiced with the great wea-
pon beams that sat in ordered ranks every-
where about the great ancient dwelling
place. And as she saw the searing bolts of
deadly dis-fire come seeking them out over

110

AMAZING STORIES

the long pale penetrays, she leaped, to one
of the tremendous weapons and sent the
vast vision beam flying along the enemy
ray paths for their source.

Horror struck into Saba, even the Saba
who had experienced all the horror and
terror that God brains could conceive in
their synthetic adventure records. For the
thought that flowed back to her along these
conductive, teleaugmentive vision beams;
that leaped out at her from the great vision
screen: that thought was not human. Hu-
mans the men looked like, but what lived
beneath their skulls made even Saba shud-
der and start back in fear and trembling.

They were things sent by a greater thing,
a thing she had not met before in her
limited life — and Saba had no time to
analyze why these apparently normal ap-
pearing men were so luridly, so evilly differ-
ent from men in their minds.

She had no time for flinching, and Saba,
seeing the enemy that had followed the
caravan of fleeing Indian men, that had
paused as the road led into territory un-
known to them, that had been feeling their
way along under the great mass of rocks
that was their sky closer and closer to
Eemeeshee ever since they had left familiar
territory, acted.

They felt for an instant that terrible
nearness of death they had brought to so
many in their life. Then they died very
quickly.

The horror that Saba had felt when she
had seen and heard their thought upon the
vision screen made her sear the bodies of
those human beings until there was no more
horror to hear from the minds, nothing
to see, only a scorched, burnt, flaming,
smoking place where their ray cars had
been. On the cavern road where their
wheeled ray mech had drawn up in line to
steady the screens for firing sight, to lay
down a blanket of accurate fire, now was
only many scattered bits of smoking metal.

* \* \*

UNKNOWING why the attack had
ceased as suddenly as it had begun,
Lane and Stevens stood there, looking at
the strange spectacle of the great soft
worm-like body of the vast Eemeeshee
turned into a raging, writhing, stricken
creature.

Midway of the long softness had ap-
peared a great burned hole where a ray
had drilled him, and one of the long soft

fleshy arms was cut nearly in two midway
from the soft billows that were his shoulder.
Lane could not help thinking as he watched
that mayhap the rays who had struck at
Eemeeshee had done him more of a service
than a harm, for the lassitude that seemed
a part of him had also been sheared away
by the sudden hiss of the burning rays.

That great white thing reared upward
and the unwounded arm moved with a ter-
rible angry swiftness here and there upon
the keyboard of switches; the many keys
like an organ keyboard; the many pedals
that protruded near his feet. He pressed,
now here, now there, and on the score of
cubical screens that made up the greater
part of the body of the transparent machine
appeared swiftly scene after scene of the
great empty underworld of unending tubes
of highways, of tiers of vast empty cham-
bers filled with their dust-laden complexi-
ties of machines and forgotten wealth.
Farther and farther Eemeeshee searched
for the source of the attack.

Finally he found the smoking series of
spots where the enemy ray mech had
drawn up for attack. Wonderingly he
looked at it, and as he .looked the soft
voice of Saba could be heard explaining to
Eemeeshee that she had found and slain
the attackers already.

Now Eemeeshee sagged again and the
temporary vigor that had flooded him
passed away. He began to moan and weep
like a whipped child.

A score of Saba's women and Saba swept
into the chamber, their sandaled feet mak-
ing swift whispers of haste and pity, and
Eemeeshee's wounds were carefully washed
and treated and bound up. Lane and
Stevens stood through it all, an ignored
part of the great vacant immensity that is
always the atmosphere of the Elder caverns.

At last Saba came forth from the trans-
parent winding passages of the machine
where Eemeeshee lay like the great pupa
of some vast insect thing of the past that
was presently going to hatch into a winged
god but had certainly not done so yet.

Saba paused, her lithe, full woman's
form holding a great golden basin of water
on her hip, her arm draped with bandages,
in her hand a pair of ancient scissors a
foot long.

"Saba," said Lane, seeing now his chance,
"this occurrence proves something to me
that I wish you and Eemeeshee might
fully understand. That is: you need our

THE RED LEGION

111

Red Legion terribly here. This attack will
not be the last. There will be more and
more such attacks, and the next will not
be so easily wiped out by one pair of
hands as was this one. You need our
young Indian braves, trained and ready
and watching from every far flung ray
post. You need steadily to grow and grow
and have more and more strength until
there is no ray group anywhere to face
your strength. Will you explain this to
Eemeeshee?"

"I do not need to. Even now I saw in
his angry mind just such plans. I will go
ahead and have my women train your folk
in the uses of the rays, and we will put
your plans swiftly into operation. You
call in from their far homes the rest of
your Red Legion and we will make this
place something different from what it has
been. It will be good to have new faces,
new eager spirits about. I like your
plans."

LANE did not wait for more. Stevens
by his side, they hastened back to the
camp of the refugees and explained the
situation. The attack had gone unnoticed
by the camp. The Indians slept peacefully
in their blankets.

The next morning the great hidden door
in the rock lifted, and two of the cars
that had come in went out again. In the
cars were two of the young braves intent
upon delivering their message to the other
centers of the Red Legion. Stevens had
told them to go in person to each of the
headquarters of the Legion and tell them
in their own words just what had happened,
what Eemeeshee was, and that they were
all needed to defend their ancient God and
the gateway to the vast wisdom of the past.

Eemeeshee lay in his great crystal nest
and glowered and growled and nursed his
hurts. Saba and Lane and Stevens worked
hard daily, teaching, getting a force of
ready hands upon the ancient ray controls,
getting prepared as swiftly as they might
for a repetition of the attack from the
north. Every day they spread their force
a little, posting men to the four quarters
with the old rays reaching out for forty
miles to watch steadily, sweeping across the
innumerable passages through the rock
where attack might come. They were now
vastly safer than before the attack, but Lane
knew that anyone really conversant with
the uses of the ancient mechanisms must

be able to overcome them. For they knew
so little of it. If it broke . . .

Only Saba and one or two of the women
knew the least thing about repairing the
machines. They were too green, as Saba
explained, really to fight with the weapons
as the old accounts told her they were
meant to be fought with.

But the attack did not come, and now
into the great door every night came three
or four or a dozen of the men of the Red
Legion; men from Oregon; men from Can-
ada; men from the pueblos; Mexican In-
dians sent their number. Swiftly the word
spread and steadily their numbers grew.\*

Now papooses shouted and ran in the
gloomy so-long-empty caverns, and cooking
fires gleamed by the hundreds. Indian
women swayed in their tribal mating
dances, the braves sprang and whooped in
the war-dance. Life had come to this
place of Eemeeshee's. And over the new
activity glowered ever the transformed
Eemeeshee, and one could read ever in
his heard thought: "Vengeance. Eemee-
shee has a way to vengeance."

Said Saba:

"No more does Eemeeshee flood the
chambers with the dream images and wal-
low in the stim-dreams of beauty and
wonder. No more does he take pleasure
day after day and year after year. These
wounds have changed him — he has waked
up! I have never seen him so intent upon
anything as he is now upon growing strong
and fighting with these enemies who at-
tacked without warning. His anger burns
steadily, higher and higher. He haS taught
me many things he formerly denied me.
Come, I will show you what he taught
me yesterday."

Saba took Lane to a great round ma-
chine. A mouth about three feet across

♦Temples and Caves — from Enc. Brit.

. . . but in many very ancient sanctuaries the
place of a temple is taken by a natural or arti-
ficial grotto .(Phoenician Astarte grottoes — the

trotto of Cynthus in Delos), or else the temple
i built over a subterranean opening (as at
Delphi), and while this may ... be connected
with the cult of telluric deities . . .

The altar in front of temple had its prototype
in altars at the mouths of sacred caves . . .

The influence of the cave temple . . . undeniable
widespread type of sanctuary.

Certain adyta in Greece were actually subter-
ranean and the association of oracles with caves
is well known.

112

AMAZING STORIES

in the center of the mech gave a view of
successive coils reaching in, each coil a
little smaller than the other to the bottom
of the inward cone. She switched on the
power and from the big orifice came a
strong bass hum — a pulsing of power that
streamed from the opening in a visible
flow of power.

"What is it?" asked Lane. "It looks
something like a cyclotron."

"This cyclotron you speak of; what is
that?"

"It is a device they use to speed up an
electric particle. There are several kinds,
depending on the kind of particle they
want to speed up. They bombard matter
with it: it becomes more radioactive. It
was used in developing the atom bomb."

"This, then," Saba smiled, "is a 'cyclo-
tron-in-reverse.' This is used to slow down
the flow of certain kinds of particles until
the body can catch and hold them. It
makes the energy that is always about us
available to the body by slowing down
the speeds at which the parts of energy
travel. Each coil is creator of a magnetic
field which attracts, catches and slows the
flight of the bits of energy until as it
emerges it is a slow flood of the stuff from
which all matter is synthesized by nature —
and the body of the person in the flow
takes in the energy just as we take food in
through the mouth. It prepares energy
for the absorption by that kind of matter
which our body is made of. At least, such
was the explanation Eemeeshee gave me as
he pointed out the uses to which I was to
put this machine and others like it. It is
to be used to make our warriors strong
and smart and able to learn quickly what
they must learn to defeat this horrible
enemy who has attacked us."

LANE put out his hand, immersed it in
the flow of energy from the orifice.
His hand seemed to swell, to feel strong.
The lassitude of relaxation went out of it —
strength pulsed within his fingers and
flowed up his arm. His whole body felt
invigorated just from the immersion of
his hand,.

Saba watched him.

"Put your head in, if you want really
to note the effects. It makes the brain
immensely more active. And the effect
continues long afterward. It is like charg-
ing a battery, a battery of life energy,
with life energy."

Lane stooped, dipped his head momen-
tarily into the pulsing flow of strange
electricray. Through his mind flashed a
picture of vast plans for the Red Legion,
of great conquests of just such valuable
secrets of the old machines of the caves,
and of vast conquests and growth for the
Red Legion. As he removed his head,
these pictures died slowly out, but his
mind remained sharper, clearer, he knew
he was vastly more alive.

"Did he show you anything else?" this
new and sharper Lane asked Saba, his
eyes glittering now with energy and en-
thusiasm. This machine for invigorating
his men had heartened him.

Saba led him toward another great ma-
chine, somewhat similar in appearance but
with a greatly more complicated keyboard
of control dials.

"Yes. He showed me this, saying: 'If
you need monetary metals, you can make
them with this.' It is a similar appearing
machine — the same cone of great coils
reaching inward, but its use is certainly
vastly different. It also slows up the par-
ticles that circulate always about us, makes
of them a concentrated flow; but it has
atunements that regulate what kind of
particle is slowed. Watch and you will see
why. Have you some base metal?"

Lane searched his pockets, found only a
fifty cent piece, some pennies and a nickel.

Saba took the pennies and the nickel
from him and placed them on a sliding
tray before the mouth of the power cone,
slid the tray into the center of the orifice.
She pulled the activating lever.

The hum rose and rose in pitch, and as
Lane watched Saba adjusted the dial to
a marking.

"See, Eonee, this marking is a symbol
that means gold. There is a mark for each
element you want to produce, though these
markings can only be used for materials
heavier in the atomic table than the mate-
rial you place in the flow."

Presently she withdrew the tray, picked
up the coins and handed them to Lane.
Lane looked at them, hefted them. They
had increased greatly in weight, changed
to a red gold in color. He took his knife,
cut one of the coins. It was pure gold.

"Transmutation ! " ejaculated Lane.
"Here we have the means to finance an
army, an empire. Eemeeshee should get
angry oftener; God knows what we might
not learn from him of these wonders. With

THE RED LEGION

113

a source of gold like this we can hire all
the men we need. Get this machine work-
ing steadily and produce a good supply
of this stuff. We must send out more
recruiting agents and get our strength up.
There will be plenty to do now, Saba."

"I thought you would find a use for
this." Saba was very pleased that he saw
the possibilities for everyone rather than
as a means of getting rich. "It is a similar
flow of slowed particles which make the
matter progressively into heavier and
heavier elements by the same method by
which nature produced them in the first
place; the intake of tiny particles of energy
until the atoms build up into heavier atoms
— the original process of transmutation
which has produced every element from its
tiny tenuous beginnings in space is here
speeded up to utility by a concentration
of the same basic material from which all
matter grows. The Elder race was not
stupid, was it?"

"No, Saba, we must work very hard to
retrieve some of this mighty science for
modern men."

## Chapter VI

**CHAPTER VI**

**Preparation for Battle**

MONTHS passed swiftly. A business-
like activity, an atmosphere of in-
dustry, had replaced the lazy, secluded
ways of the deserted hide-out of Eemeeshee.

Outside the big rock door in the cliff
which gave entry to the underworld, the
buildings of a mock gold mine gave them
a cover for their gold production by the
machine for transmutation. Also a cover
for their recruiting activities.

Down in the caverns several thousand
men now had their homes; practiced, drilled
and studied steadily. They were swiftly
reaching a point of full preparation for
Eemeeshee's planned conquest of the
caverns under Montana, and particularly
those immediately under Butte.

The spider people, called in by the hun-
dreds, had been treated with the beneficial
energy flows from the ben-ray mech. Now,
their faces sharpened in intelligence by its
effects, they conducted scouting forces
northward. Under their clicking, know-
ing guidance, the caverns were mapped,
the roads carefully explored.

In the midst of this mapping work, Tch
Tch and his "men" captured two of the

enemy set to watch their activity. Lane,
watching them taken to Eemeeshee for a
going over, got a good idea of just who and
what the enemy were.

\The two men were dark, scrawny samples
of humanity, in appearance like Paris
Apaches or the criminal cockney type.
But Lane saw, though they were human
enough in general appearance, something
had happened to their minds.

This became clearer as Eemeeshee aug-
mented their thought within his telaug
screens, watched their progress across the
continent, their murder of everyone of the
old ray groups they had found; a steady
progress of conquest by silent murder of
every intelligent bit of life they had found
in the caves. Some of the people they had
killed had solved the cryptic puzzles of
the ancient writing and were fast winning
for modern men the ancient writings of
science which would have proved as valu-
able in time to man as man could have
developed in many thousands of years of
perfect progress. For the ancient metal
records contained scientific method which
it had taken a vastly superior race eons
of time to perfect.

These murderous ignoramuses under
their woman leader, Debar Da Sylva, had
wiped out many such quiet studious people
in their uncomprehending grabbing for val-
ue, while the very murder by which they
obtained gold and ancient stim mech wiped
out knowledge worth infinitely more than
the gain.

Both Eemeeshee and Lane had a pretty
good understanding of what they were up
against when the two captives died. Their
opposition was a gang of ruthless and
ignorant killers, who had for years been
trying completely to wipe out all intelli-
gent life in the underworld so that the
whole mighty power of the underworld
would be in their hands alone. That, in
the process, they destroyed the whole
future of men and set back progress
another few thousand years, did not matter
to them. They had no understanding of
any duty toward other men. That, in the
process, they had been destroying every
surface man who knew of the antique world
of wonder in the under-rock, did not matter
to them; though many of these surface
people "who knew" were the world's best
medical research scientists and the be?Jth
of millions of future men depended on
their work. They were too ignorant to

114

AMAZING STORIES

understand it was not self interest to kill
a doctor, that one's own health depends
on the health of medicine as a whole.

They had succeeded in their intention
to wipe out all life in the sparsely inhabited
caverns in the eastern states and had now
progressed into the western caverns. Some
few thousand people, intent on wiping out
all life in an area bigger than the surface
of the world — and succeeding due to the
potent destructive power and vast range
of the Elder race's weapons.

That was a terrible, a strange, weird
scene: the death of these two murderous
creatures. Standing before Eemeeshee, his
vast form writhing like a great pudding
bag, his great face with its long, upturned,
outlandish nose peering down into their
mind pictures augmented in a dozen screens
before him, and behind the two terrified
men the tall grey-white figures of the spider
men, a dozen of them towering about the
two men holding them there before Eemee-
shee's great crystal machine home.

Eemeeshee's mind growing angrier and
angrier as he summed up their bloody at-
tempt to inherit the whole cavern world
for themselves. Some million people, of
the diverse and rather wonderfully in-
formed kind that one finds sparsely scat-
tered through the endless windings and
tiers of the cavern world; men like Eemee-
shee who had lived in the machines for
centuries; men like Tch Tch who had
evolved into a separate form of life, but
whose clever fingers knew many a secret
of the Elder science; people like Saba, who
coupled with natural intelligence had had
a lifetime of study under some centuries-
old creature like Eemeeshee to become
what man has always called the "sorceress"
and worshipped; and the treasure hunters
of the caverns — many, many of these they
had killed by slow torture, wresting from
their unwilling minds all their hard won
secrets of the places where the Elder
stores were hidden.

THE steady and successful progress of
this attempt to inherit the whole ancient
secret of the caves for one small group of
a few thousand slavish robot-minded war-
riors, and their half dozen leaders such as
the foremost, Deliar Da Sylva, dismayed
and frightened Eemeeshee. But also gave
him the courage of deperation.

Softly he pressed the stim button, lanced
down a generously pleasant ray of stim-

control upon the minds of the spider men,
commanding them to kill these two bloody-
minded captives. The gentle - natured
spider men, without being able to help
themselves, closed their long-fingered hands
about the necks of these two from the far
European Hellpits — and their breath soon
stopped struggling to bring life to their
bodies. Eemeeshee wanted the spider men
to understand that all who lived bloodily
as these men must die, and he wanted them
to learn how to kill. The spider men left
his presence wiser by a terrible intent to
wipe v>ut the Da Sylvas of the cavern
world.

Lane looked down upon Eemeeshee's blue
and gold and crystal nest of ancient techni-
cal wonder, the glory of its beauty marred
— or enhanced — by the contrast of the tall
weird spider men, dragging out the dead
bodies of the two captives — and silently
approved of Eemeeshee's resurgence of
forgotten spirit. Had Lane been able fully
to analyze the craven fear which had made
Eemeeshee do this deed, and deprive their
Legion of much needed information in
one savage and fearful impulse to destroy
an enemy, he would not have felt so ap-
proving of Eemeeshee. That ancient and
complex brain was not a man's. Reading
those minds had given Eemeeshee a terrible
fear of this enemy that he must fight or
die. He would fight, yes, because he must.

Lane turned to Saba, where she stood
beside him watching the incongruity of
the ancient wonder work and the peculiar
and ugly life that moved about the mighty
beauty of Eemeeshee's chamber.

"These allies of ours are not pretty, but
they seem efficient."

"Eemeeshee should have preserved those
lives for future reference," was all Saba said,
and Lane did not notice her preoccupation.
For Saba had noticed the craven fear in
Eemeeshee and realized that all was not
well with the great, pink-and-white and
enormously ugly baby who was their leader.
She inwardly resolved to keep an eye on
future mental processes of that intricate
and depraved brain that she served. Eemee-
shee was a coward, she realized.

Eemeeshee's plans moved forward, driven
by the desperation of Eemeeshee's full
realization that the enemy was determined
to wipe out all the older intelligents of the
caverns, to have the whole cavern world
as their private possession. Such an im-
mense concept of selfishness had never been

THE RED LEGION

115

conceived by Eemeeshee. But he knew
their project was possible with the Elder
rays.

The day before their big push started
northward, Lane dispatched a large packet
of blueprints, plans and transcriptions
from the Elder writings to a certain famous
engineers club in California. His purpose
was to leave in the hands of civilized men
a full account of the affair if disaster over-
took their attempt to reclaim the northern
caverns for the red men. It would have
saddened him to have seen the secretary
of that club open his package.

The "educated" secretary read the ex-
planatory letter carefully and consigned the
whole packet of Elder wisdom to the waste-
basket as the work of a deluded madman.

So many efforts of so many great men
have been lost through the inability of
"educated" men to give credence to any
wisdom outside their limited "education."
The plans and blueprints would have given
modern men the secrets of the beneficial
force flows, as well as the transmutation
apparatus and the other mechanisms he had
been able to understand and have blue-
prints drawn. But the "educated" secre-
tary of the famous engineers club "knew"
transmutation was "impossible."

This done, and his conscience free, his
duty to the race of men fulfilled — he
thought — Lane bent his energies to making
of Eemeeshee's war a success. He knew
that all their lives depended on winning
this struggle; for flight would save none
of them from the terrific range and sensi-
tive detection of the Elder race machinery
in the hands of murderers.

THAT advance! Those endless, vaulted
halls extending on and on into every
varying shifting translucent pearly color,
pillared with rose and soft gleaming purples
and transparent gold — endless shimmering
beauty.

Along the parallel gigantic roads, made
to carry the vast traffic of a world packed
with giant people of an energy and a
titanic industry now lost to the mind of
man (forever?); along those roads leading
on and on into the mysterious beauties
of a wonder land, rolled the weaponed,
ray-armored cars of the ancients. Rolled?
Floated! For the cars were half-spheres,
floating on antigravity devices. Automati-
cally they kept an unvarying height off
the floor, the same height from the ceiling,

no matter how many variations the con-
struction had built into the way. A good
thousand of these cars they had run out
of the abandoned arsenal storerooms.
Under Eemeeshee's instructions, learned to
run them — and gold and the Red Legion
had provided men to operate them, trained
the men for the past months in their
operation, in handling the titanic weapons
built into the ancient war vehicles.

"How can such portable weapons fight
the more massive fixed ray installations?"
Lane had asked Eemeeshee.

"I will show you, for you must practice
the maneuver so as to be able to form and
strike simultaneously. See these markings
on this huge stationary dynamo? That
mark indicates the 'gens' or 'negs' of
power the dynamo will generate. One
kind of dynamo generates the beneficial
'gens' of energy, the other makes the
'negs' of detrimental weapon energy.
Some dynamos marked with 'erg' generate
a kind of mixture of both which has a
multitude of uses, according to the nature
of the mixture\* The number of these
units indicates the range of the ray, the
focus intensity being equal. This dial indi-
cates the focus intensity of the beam,
which you have already learned. Increas-
ing the width of the beam decreases the
range, as you know. As this machine is

* Gen was an antique word meaning to create

energy of a certain beneficial kind. Thus it had
been adopted as the word for the unit of flow of
beneficial energies from the dynamos designed to
furnish the synthetic life-energy flows upon which
the underworld life was based — as is our civiliza-
tion upon the production of wheat. Thus "gen"
was to their supply of life energy the word of
unit as volt is to electric flow.

Neg was the reverse word unit, meaning unit
of inverted destructive. De power. As volt is to
electric, so is neg to energy flows which "negate"
life. Note persistence of their word "neg" in our
word "negate" to "neg" a "te" flow is to neutral-
ize the life energies.

Erg is the word for unit of power of another
kind. Between the opposed natures of gen and
neg electric lie many in-between kinds of energy
mixtures, as complex in nature as are compounds
of molecular mixtures in chemistry to the ele-
ment's relative simplicity. Mostly these are use-
less, and an erg is the unit of measurement for
these mixture-flows. It is a unit used to indicate
the degree of useless power mixed in their gen
flows. Thus a current is 90 gen to ten erg; nearly
pure life energy value in the creation of beneficial
electric.

116

AMAZING STORIES

marked "one hundred gens" and the dy-
namos within the anti-gravity cars are
marked one gen or one neg it will take a
hundred of such cars to equal the power of
one such great fixed dynamo.

"But the weapons within the cars are
more finely built for fighting, more flexible
of focus and can achieve much the same
effect by amassing some seventy-five of
their beams in one path. This can only be
done by lining up the cars so that their
beams strike through the same penetrative
bore or guide ray, then their kinetic sum
overcomes resistance of the same amount
as the single beam of the giant dynamo.
But there are only one or two such great
dynamos in an arsenal. We can overcome
a stationary ray installation by lining up
more 'negs' of power than they have in
their dynamos. Understand?"

"I follow you, Eemeeshee. It can be
done by careful work."

"It can be done. There is this draw-
back: we cannot see so well with the small
screens of these cars as with the larger
power augmentation screen. They can see
farther and better. But I have a way
of providing us with equal sight. We have
put the anti-gravs under some of the great
vision screens, mounted the power units
to operate it on other anti-grav units, con-
nected them together with flexible cables —
and, behold, we have portable vision quite
as good as their stationary vision. Because
the anti-gravs float exactly level, it is quite
as satisfactory, for there is so little vibration
in the anti-grav devices that even when in
motion we can see nearly as well as a
solid and stationary device. We will ap-
proach this enemy, stop at the utmost range
we can see them, line up our weapon cars in
exact simultaneous line of fire — and let
them have it."

Eemeeshee was speaking with his ab-
stract thought language which Lane had
learned to interpret even more easily than
English, as in fact, it is vastly a more
potent medium of communication than oral
language.

FOR the trip, Eemeeshee had squeezed
his huge body into a smaller life-ma-
chine equipped with anti-gravs. When the
central antigrav is tipped slightly, it acts
as a frictionless drive of great power. The
gravity devices on the perimeter of the
lower circle of the half-sphere are never
moved from their exact alignment. These

cars can travel at any speed the human
eye and nerve can control within the cav-
erns. They cannot be used outside the
caverns without adjustment, as they have
a device in their top that, like an electric
eye, watches the ceiling and shuts off the
anti-grav flow automatically, keeping the
car a certain distance from the roof. Taken
outside the cavern, this device would fail
to work, the car would shoot straight up,
unless the manual height control were un-
derstood and operated by hand.

Their long lines of floating cars, parallel
and beautiful in their perfection of ancient
workmanship, was fronted by Saba and
Lane in a great vision ray-mech floated on
anti-gravs. In the center of the lines was
the great living machine of crystal and
gleaming metal with Eemeeshee puffing
inside. And in the rear were four smaller
vision devices with Saba's women inside.
Bringing up the rear was Stevens, inside
the hugest hemi-sphere, a great single ray
mech of longer range than any of the
smaller cars. The larger part of the car
was packed with small powerful dynamos,
all powering a vast vision and firing beam
in one compact unit. Eemeeshee had
assured Stevens that nothing portable could
outreach it. Their only danger, until they
reached the location of the enemy under
Butte, was from carelessness. If they
failed to see some scouting ray and allowed
it to get too close to their ranks, they
would lose many men until the ray was put
out of action.

Swiftly, silently, the tremendous assem-
bly of ancient power floated northward.
Here and there on the shimmering pearly
beauty of the pillared ways hung a dried
human head, giving mute evidence of the
warfare of the degenerate, savage peoples
who had peopled these caverns nomadically.

Or, a crucified mummy would hang from
the great T symbol which the ancient Elder
race had placed occasionally along the
ways, just as today we see now and then
the Christian cross which has derived
from the ancient symbolic use of the T.
The savages who had roamed here and
perhaps fathered the present day spider-
like "creeps," had left such evidences of
their warring, and the dry warm air of the
underworld had preserved the flesh per-
fectly, just as it had preserved the ancient
machines and handiwork of the Elder race
no matter the eon of time that had passed.

Eemeeshee's vast portable living machine

THE RED LEGION

117

was equipped with a mass of enigmatic
apparatus. What it was all for, in truth,
it is probable that even Eemeeshee did not
know. But he certainly knew how to use
most of it to advantage.

AS THEIR maps told them they were
nearing ray field range, Eemeeshee
shot forth a great grey beam of power
far ahead of the advancing columns of
war mech, and the results were startling.
Lane speculated, as he watched the effects,
just what the power-beam might be. He
figured that the ray in some way altered
the inner polarity of the basic building
blocks of matter— the electronic polarity—
so that it was no longer transparent to
the penetray beams.

For, far ahead of their advance, the
vision beams of penetrative ray had care-
fully revolved over the whole arc ahead,
seeking for any sign of opposition. Now,
as Eemeeshee played his ultra powerful
beam of grey light ahead through the rock,
the rock turned slowly grey and opaque
to their vision beams, and they were ad-
vancing, instead of through apparent glass,
through natural looking grey rock tunnels.

His purpose, evidently, was to keep the
opposition's penetrative rays from finding
their position. That it also obscured their
own means of sight troubled Lane. But
the purpose of the ancient being in the great
crystal complexity floating weirdly in their
midst became clearer as Eemeeshee shut
off the grey beam. Now, as they neared the
farther edge of the cloudlike greyness he
had created within the rock, their own
penetray beams became able to peer out
ahead — while themselves were invisible
within the opacity of the rock. Lane halted
his floating car just within this area of
opacity, and waited, searching far ahead
with his vision beam, watching his screen
with great care for the slightest sign of
enemy preparation.

For what seemed forty miles ahead the
ways led, parallel, empty of life — the alien
splendor of the construction glistening here
and there where walls \_ and vertical con-
struction had kept the usual blanket of
time's dust from forming. Even through
that pall of eons of slow precipitation of
dust the lovely forms of the machine art
of the ancients showed, row on row, ar-
rangement on arrangement, chamber after
chamber, tier on tier of vast, waiting per-
fection — waiting always for the feet of

those immortal Elder masters who would
never return to this death-laden planet.

Of the modern interlopers within these
sacred halls, there was no sign. No breath
of a ray trail, no slightest bristling ionizing
of the dust layer betrayed with its stirring
a watch ray. Not even a footprint upon
that dust, not one tread of the magnetic
anti-grav beams upon the dust-layer left
its tell-tale path before them. Apparently
no life had touched these endless tunnels
and God-built chambers since they were
abandoned so long ago. Yet their maps
told them that hereabout were the forces
who had taken over the caverns under
Montana. That hereabout must lie swift
and terrible destruction for them if unwary.

Slowly they crept forward, their watch
rays sweeping, sweeping, and Eemeeshee's
mysterious beam changing the polarity of
the rock ahead of them so that themselves
remained invisible to any penetray beam
from the distance. Lane realized that this
opacity yielded to their own beams because
close to the source such a beam is vastly
more powerful than at its tenuous further
end. He appreciated Eemeeshee's abilities,
for this hiding of themselves within a field
of opacity in the rock was in truth clever.

"I hope Eemeeshee has a few more tricks
up his sleeve against these European ray.
God knows what they may use against us,"
Lane murmured to Saba. She smiled re-
assuringly.

"The old one is really enjoying himself
for the first time in my life time. I would
not believe he could change so. You have
done him much good; I would pit his
ancient heritage of wisdom from the strange
people who fathered him against any bunch
of modern murderers. These who set upon
your Red Legion and drove them out; we
know more about them than you think.
They have killed and tormented the
'creeps'; some of the spider men had fled
westward to tell me of them. Also the
nomads have told me of them. We know
what they are, and we know how they
fight. But behind them may be some old
behemoth from the past who may not be
such easy prey. Eemeeshee is not the only
old one in the caves."

Cautiously the long columns of floating
cars crept ahead with the care of troops
penetrating a mine field. When death
comes from ray, it comes lancing swiftly
out of unseeable distance, and the swiftest
only is life left. To the first who sighted

118

AMAZING STORIES

the enemy, to them came the advantage;
and they meant to be the first.

## Chapter VII

CHAPTER VII

**The Battle Is Joined**

XTOW, quite suddenly, they saw life
■J-^ ahead. Like a telescopic view of an
anthill, the distance making them so tiny,
and the penetrative rays making all the rock
about the far off titan burrows like so
much glass. They saw the city of the
intruders.

This was what once had been the home
of the lost tribe of Votan Indians; Indians
inheriting all the pride and culture of a
race more advanced than the Mayan plus
the knowledge of science that centuries
of life in the wonder caverns of the Elder
race had given them. The ancient original
beauty of the place was overhung with the
semi-barbaric trappings, the feathered
head-dresses, the blankets woven in bizarre
and ancient symbolic patterns, woven by
nimble fingered squaws here where all the
beauty of the Elder work inspired to
greater understanding of the nature of
beauty than ever surface red men rose to
acquire. Pelts of wolf and hides of deer,
the fleeces of sheep and the hides of bear
decorated the ancient spring-metal couches
and softened the polished stone to the foot.

Sprawled amid this semi-barbaric Indian
splendor were some few hundred European
aliens, clad in modern clothing, loud jackets
and slacks ; gaudy silk dresses from surface
shops. On the women, bare white shoulders

♦These dis-cannon are of several varied kinds.
Mostly they have a dial which controls atune-
ment, and fire over a penetrative conductive
"lead" as vision ray which conducts the destruc-
tive bolt but is not itself harmful in any way.
The control dial alters the nature of the dis-bolt
so that it can be slowly changed through a long
series of intensities, from mildly warm to harmful
"de" to straight dis, which latter and worst will
melt a hole through the rock for many miles.
Usually such a cannon is used on the "de" set
which will knock out an animal at thirty miles,
or kill if held there for a short time. This "de"
is an detrimental ray used for many purposes,
originally designed apparently for such purposes
as an insecticide — it can be set to sweep a great
area with diffuse beams of mildly destructive
power, or concentrated into a stronger beam one
shot of which upsets a man's mind into temporary
insanity.

aped surface luxury, while waiting on them
were the Indians who had lived and ruled
secretly here up to their advent. Lane
knew they had not been here more than
two years. Hugging the hope that their
short tenure had not given them time to
get fully acquainted with all the resources
and weapons of the intricately chambered
tiers of caverns, Lane swung the nozzle of
his dis-cannon\* in line with his vision
penetray, prepared to fire when the others
were aligned to fire with him.

Stim rays bathed the great chambers
where the white newcomers lolled, appar-
ently engaged in a debauch. The Indians,
clad in loin cloths or in grey linen jackets
and skirts which seemed to be a kind of
servant's uniform, bore drinks and food;
or stood stony faced, as door tenders; or
pushed mop and bucket along the endless
corridors.

For entertainment, one of the gaudier
females was crushing the eight-foot, stick-
like limbs of a "creep" inch by inch with
a hammer; two men held his piteously
soreaming form while she plied the ham-
mer and the rest looked on. Evidently this
was great sport. Lane ground his teeth at
the needless, purely wanton cruelty. Lane
had much to learn of the nature of these
people.

In the great war-ray chamber near at
hand to the lolling sybarites who ruled the
place, were the stub fingered ray ro.\*\*

Lane had learned from Saba that the
ancients' word for the magnetism between
sexes — between man and woman — was
"ne." He had observed this animal mag-
netism that binds all humanity together in
an electrical matrix, over the telaug beams
which augment all these subtle electrical
flows into mental vision strength. He had
realized that "ne" was a most important
part of life, making it much more inter-

* + These are men found around any of the dero

"bunches." Men who have been used by "make-
ray" (ray control) to fire the more detrimental
of the huge old rays; used in warfare until their
fingers rot off from X-ray infection; until their
minds cease to exist as anything but unnecessary
adjunct. They are often huge men, drafted into
such service for their size and strength, and never
thereafter allowed any freedom. They wait in
their ray-chambers just as the great old mech-
anisms wait — until it is time for action. Then the
"make-rays" reach in, seize their poor minds and
direct them in the battle.

THE RED LEGION

119

esting than it would be without. Now,
watching these newcomers to this part of
the caverns, he realized that the character
signs — the variant-natured "ne" charge
which each physical body exerts upon each
other physical body — were either missing
from their bodies, or so vague as hardly
to register mentally even with the mighty
augmentation of the ancient power tubes.
Instead there was present a repellance
("ne" is an attraction) which acted in an
exactly opposite manner to "ne." Instead
of liking each other, admiring or respect-
ing their most capable and best looking
members, they hated each other, and this
hatred was in direct proportion to their
ability and appearance.

Lane realized that here was revealed the
reason for their characters being cruel and
evil; the reason for their constant and sav-
age warring.

Saba glanced at him as he observed this
startling difference, which was so obvious
over the telaug beams with which they
were observing the enemy.

"The Elder word for that is "de," she
told him. "It makes the difference between
human and destructive beast."

As Lane swung his telaug beam across
the ray-mutilated stalwarts waiting in
the war-ray chambers, he observed that
this "de" was even more strongly present
among them. He guessed its presence was
due to the effects of the destructive rays
created by the great ray-cannon, ' effects
which destroyed the "ne" generative inner
life of the cells leaving an animal whose
life could hardly be a life thereafter, since
even the love he bore a woman turned to
hate in his breast. He observed that only
habits of discipline kept these great, dull-
eyed men from throwing themselves upon
each other in a struggle to the death.
An explanation of the real cause of men's
terrible and constantly recurring wars was
here presented to Lane's eyes. But Lane
saw no solution to it at first glance, other
than shielding all men from such natural
occurring rays by some kind of dielectric
sheathing for their cities which would keep
out such "de" generating rays.

For a picture of what the underworld has
always been to surface men, read "The Silver
Nail" by Carmen Sylva (the Queen of Roumania)
and Alma Strettell. There are several pertinent
tales in her important book— "Legends from River
And Mountain."

T)UT Lane did not have much time for
speculative thought, for Eemeeshee
was swiftly preparing for action. The float-
ing hemi-spheres of smaller ray-cannon
cars were lining up, one behind the other,
under swiftly darting telaug beams bearing
his thought to each driver.

Lane could not help dreading the first
clash for he realized that their attack upon
this huge citadel with their small rays was
apparently foolhardy, and that none of
them but Eemeeshee and possibly Saba
really could evaluate the situation in mili-
tary terms.

Somehow Lane could not feel a great deal
of confidence in Eemeeshee after old
Secumne's analysis of him. Would his
resurgence of interest in life remain or
would he suddenly sink again into the
apathy and dream-making with which he
had wasted so many years — how many
centuries, Lane wondered?

Saba hissed in almost inaudible tones.

"Look at those 'courageous' animals who
could fight their way through a group of
unarmed children, themselves unseen, and
with these terrible weapons from a distance
wipe out the young humans — and often
have. Are they not wonderful, agh?"

Lane looked over her ray screen, and
sent his own beam along its invisible direc-
tion sensing its path with his telaug ear.
Soon he heard and saw the leaders of this
invasion.

"Mrs.. Da Sylva, may I get a drink?"

A young and pretty slave girl stood in
her worn rags near the door, evidently she
could not leave her position except by
permission.

The woman's answer, "Later!" told Lane
enough; the girl had to remain standing
there thirsty. He knew automatically she
would not get her drink till her duty
period ended. He swung his ray a trifle to
take in this Da Sylva.

About her incredibly huge waist strained
a glittering girdle of fine metal work. In
the girdle was caught many shining loops
of dark transparent satin that Lane realized
had never been woven by modern hands or
machines; it was too beautiful material.
Through the beautiful stuff her heavy
thighs, the great hips, gleamed grossly.

The barrel of her body projected starkly
nude above the girdle, burly and strong as
a man, and two strips of gleaming black
mesh broadened over her terrific breasts — •

120

AMAZING STORIES

broadening over the gross lushness like the
great buds of two horribly fecund flowers.
Something of the ugly attraction of death
was in her. She exuded a passion of
cruelty.

The great strong rounds of her shoulders
were shining naked. This stark, gross
parody of womanhood stood there, too
vividly outlined by the mellow, age-old
beauty of the Elder chamber, and the
medusa coils of her black hair framed a
face of heavy, almost masculine beauty.
The sensuous, too-full lips, an aquiline
nose — she looked the female pirate to per-
fection.

In Lane's mind her wide red mouth,
those dark horrible depths of her eyes,
the black magic of her cruePface was
printed in bitter ink forever.

Her words were directed to a milder
edition of herself, seated nearby and peer-
ing intently at something taking place in
the distance which she was watching over
the old ray screen.

"I married him, the tout, and he took
me to the caves."

"I guess you soon turned the tables on
him, eh, Deliar?"

"Precious right I did. I soon had the
big-shot wound around my finger, and it
wasn't long till he died and left me in
charge. We have come a long way since
then, haven't we, Miro?"

"We have managed to abolish these red
dupes' ideas of freedom, and made a paying
machine out of their labor, and their mines.
We have overcome the best and oldest of
the dreaded Eastern rays; the goody,
goody things that they were! And now
this rich western area lies open to us."

"When we get this area lined up to pro-
duction, we will move southward. I have
heard of some great stores of the Elder
treasures under California."

STANDING behind Miro, the Da Sylva
woman watched her, then said:
"Give that loafing workman a little
'sinus' through the soles of his feet; he
has been laying down on the job."

Manipulating a pain ray through the
screen before her, Miro laid the man upon
the mine's floor with pain, he lay there
writhing and shrieking with the sudden
attack. As the pain ceased, he got up
and seized his shovel, began to labor with
a great show of industry. What else could
he do?

N "That's what these lazy b — need, a
dose of pain to tell them they are not any-
thing but dogs to us. They will learn to
work!"

Lean-ribbed from poor food and pale
from the underworld lack of sun, the work-
men labored on, nor looked up at the
screams and commotion of the one pun-
ished. They wore regular blue denim,
ragged and soiled, in their miner's caps
the regular miner's lamp hung. It was
some ancient boring now being worked
again, and by the looks it was gold, and
very rich.

It was a white quartz vein, heavily shot
with the yellow stuff. The vein was all of
twelve feet wide. The men worked in a
heavy silence. Fear rode them was ap-
parent.

Behind Lane, Eemeeshee's preparatory
tactical rearrangement seemed about fin-
ished. As his ray swept up to them, Saba
pointed out Da Sylva's central chamber,
where the power of this place seemed to
have its home. Eemeeshee took a good
look, and Lane could hear his "Hah!" of
disgust and a kind of solemn glee in him
at the set-up. Lane knew he was thinking,
"This is going to be a cinch." Lane hoped
he was right.

Suddenly from two miles overhead a
cream-colored ray shot down through the
blackness, and the "ulegra" (Elder word
for electric) flowed over the ray, into the
war-ray chambers where the rows of great-
bodied, dull-faced fighting ro waited, ani-
mating them for the emergency that the
watch ray far overhead had sensed, having
observed the grey opacity with which
Eemeeshee had surrounded his columns.

In seconds the grey cloud around them
was shot through with the flaming dis-
beams from the great war-ray mech. They
weren't connecting, for Eemeeshee had
caused a great area of the rock to become
opaque, but they were searching out the
area with a systematic thoroughness that
left no room for doubt that they would
score a hit soon or late.

Eemeeshee's great unturned caricature
of a nose, lumpy and grotesque, flamed beet
red with excitement. His vast, pillow-
soft white body quivered like a grub on a
fish-hook as he waved both hands at the
watching rays of his columns of ray-spheres
to fire and keep firing. His excited thought
struck fear into Lane, for he was too much
like some womanish officers he had seen,

THE RED LEGION

121

who lose all self control in emergency.

But the columns of Indian-manned ray-
cars began to pull the steady-fire studs on
their instrument panels, and their thousand
rays were soon lashing out in perfect, irre-
sistible alignment toward the huge war-ray
chamber where the great mutilated bodies
of the ro-ray men moved machine-like
above the great cannon, sweeping the vast
and deadly nozzles directing dis-flow rays
in searching patterns through the opaque
cloud that was Eemeeshee's position.

Almost to the source of those flaming
beams our own beams reached, but not
quite. Something was wrong, Eemeeshee's
beams were not reaching, not striking down
those dull-faced robots. Saba added her
own huge ray to the multiple beam, 'and
the glowing transparent path of the ray
moved within a few short feet of the vast
mechanisms that were blasting at them
with the terrible energies created by that
forgotten race.

Now down from that female leader Da
Sylva's luxurious chamber a ray reached
in upon those laboring robots, searching
their minds for their almost non-existent
thoughts as she looked for a way to reach
the attackers within their impenetrable
opacity. A premonition of failure, a feel-
ing that if they were going to win this
fray and live through it they had better
do something in a hurry. Lane shot a
telaug ray back at Eemeeshee, but the old
loafer was slumped in a dead faint! Ex-
citement had proved too much for him!

Lane looked at Saba. Her flushed, wor-
ried face told him she had seen what had
happened to their champion from the past.
In spite of himself Lane had to grin at the
big booby fainting on them.

Nearer and nearer the searching, criss-
crossing dis-rays reached toward their col-
umns. Lane knew it was a matter of sec-
onds before they found the Red Legion
with death. To make matters worse, the
terrific power the their dis-rays was turn-
ing the opaque rock back to normally trans-
parent polarity, the penetrays guiding the
beams made the searched parts of the
great cloud in the rock as clear as glass.
This made it much easier for the dull-
minded robots to keep their systematic
search pattern.

Saba swung open the disc of the door,
leaped out into the great tunnel, raced
backward to the huge crystalline floating
structure in which the unconscious Eemee-

shee lay, his great lips curved in the sens-
ual, childish expression of pleasure which
was habitual to him and to all who are
slaves to the dream-mech habit. Lane
guessed he was living over some of tie
dreams of infinite pleasure which had
wasted his centuries old life.

The lithe Indian girl clawed her way
into the complexities of the interior, hurled
her soft lovely body in unaccustomed
violent exertion toward the controls of
that vast ancient machine of Eemeeshee's
where must lie their only salvation, if
there were any for them. Even as she
sought for the way into Eemeeshee's air-
tight living chamber, the master beam of
the war-ray from the enemy's robotic hu-
mans found the tail end of their column,
began to blot from existence the crystal
bubbles, which broke and melted under
the mighty power of destruction as if in
truth but bubbles of nothingness.

## Chapter VIII

**CHAPTER VIII**

**Desperate Charge**

DELIAR DA SYLVA turned to her
companion.
"There goes another danger — up in
smoke. So will they all. I am curious
as to just who and what that column of
mech is, anyway. I had not thought an-
other power like our own in strength existed
in all the western caverns."

Miro smiled in relief at her mistress.
Then she turned back to watch the terrible
power of the flaming dis-ray eating stead-
ily at the long, now revealed column of
ray-cars. She clenched and unclenched
her long-fingered, red-nailed hands until
blood streamed from the palms. It had
been a close thing and they both knew it.

"Tonight we will have our fill of killing,
the survivors will certainly enjoy them-
selves while they learn who it was they
attacked."

"When.you've sated your pleasure, may I
then kill some of them my own way?"
asked Miro, her gross face owl-hungry, her
fleshy lips curling back over her teeth
redly, a slight drool on her chin.

The great dis-ray which had been rub-
bing out the floating cars, completely
destroying the occupants, was now changed
by Da Sylva's order to a concussive vibra-
tory ray which merely laid out the occu-
pants unconscious. She wanted her meat

122

AMAZING STORIES

alive for the "fun" to follow. Swiftly the
rays swept over the endlessly long columns.

j|( ){e ijc

" \ DVANCE," screamed Saba over the
great telemach with which Eemeeshee
had maintained contact with the columns.
It was their only salvation to pull forward
those few feet needed for their beams to
reach that center of the vast machines
where sourced the beams destroying them.

As one man, the Indians, spurred to
quick obedience by Saba's shriek, swung
forward the levers of the anti-grav gener-
ators and the remaining few hundreds of
ray-cars swept forward, down upon the
flaming source of the death. Now their
beams, weakened to less than effective
strength, reached the chamber, but failed
to stop the living, mutilated gargoyles
within the chamber from their ray-driven
robot work. On and on they plunged to-
ward the death-dealing master-ray, and
swiftly the great vibratory beams lashed
at them.

Saba now pressed all the studs she knew
anything about on the great organ-like
keyboard of Eemeeshee's weapon car, and
the beams reached out toward the war-ray
chamber where the ray-ro toiled like mad-
dened devils swinging the great controls
of the master mech — for they were built
for men three times the modern height.

Saba downed the "ro" at the great lever
of the master-beam, one by one they fell as
she flung back her hair from her flaming
face and strained every muscle at the great
machine's levers. Clumsily the huge beam
swept about the chamber, striking the
laboring ro more by chance than by skill.
The whole smoking and scream-filled
chamber fell into near darkness as the
big human robots dropped in death and
their weight, dropped releasingly from the
levers, let the great, whining dynamos slow
into an idling hum.

Saba started her search of the whole
area for the other war-ray posts which she
knew must be manned; must be readying
themselves for attack.

Following her lead, the red men at the
smaller ray controls sent their beams lanc-
ing out in a terrific criss-cross of searching
rays — for there were several hundred of
them still in untouched condition. All
about lay their comrades, some charred
and still-smoking corpses, others in a trance
like death from the concussion of the

vibratory ray sat at their ray-mech switch-
panels like frozen men, staring straight
ahead, or slumped in retching paralysis
from the effects of other beams.

Now, seeing the mighty mass of ray still
searching for them, the Da Sylva ray-ro,
stationed far above her chambers\* in des-
peration gave up their silence and dark-
ness which had protected from this sudden
assault and staked their chances on a sud-
den lashing attack with their long distance
ray-needles. (These are very thin pencils
of ray whose very narrowness makes the
power needed to activate them much less,
and the "carry" of the ray is much farther.)

These fiery needles of death reaching
down at them from a half dozen points in
the darkness overhead, began to pick off
the red men one by one, the fiery needles
searching swiftly through their bodies till
a fatal spot was found. (The pain of such
a death is excruciating, for the needles
are not fatal unless they pierce the heart
or cut the spinal column at the base of
the brain.) Steadily these needles lanced
through their flesh, searching inexorably
for their heart strings; while Saba with
Eemeeshee's master mech ray searched the
miles of darkness overhead for the source
of the needles.

One by one, under the fierce-eyed, sweat-
ing girl's swift desperate hands, the far,
fiery lances of death ceased to plague them,
and at last the whole area before their
advance fell silent and dark.

* In the ancient war-ray arrangement of ray

chambers, the ray-mech are grouped about a
central master ray in concentric rings of eight or
ten tiers of levels, making a hundred to two-
hundred ray chambers disposed in a cylindrical
shape with the master ray at the center. Modern
dwellers in the caverns usually man but some
half-dozen of these ancient chambers, and are able
to use but two or three percent of the mech-
anisms installed in the vast chambers. But to
search the intricacies of the great old defensive
setup took time.

In the story "Masked World," I described the
use of a teleport for purposes of attaining im-
mortality. I want to tell you this use of the
teleport is purely invention. To my knowledge
the teleport leaves nothing behind, is not safe for
transportation of life any distance — though it
might be so in capable hands. Most teleporta-
tions of humans result in amnesia or total in-
sanity. Will try to label in stories which uses
of antique mech are correct \ and which are
invention.— R.S.S.

THE RED LEGION

123

Now again Saba called into the augment
mech her command, "Advance!" and again
the levers plunged forward, their cars lifted
slightly and slid forward faster, faster, into
the heart of the web of caverns where
laired that evil acquisitiveness, that cruel,
fleshy female thing Lane had seen for short
moments before the attack began.

AS THEY slid silently forward in the
darkness Lane was thinking of a news-
paper item he had seen a month before of
a treasure of two billion dollars of bullion
hidden by the Japanese in the waters of
Tokyo bay. He connected their victory,
inexperienced and inept as it had been,
with this item in the papers. For if ray
personnel and information and power was
as all-embracing and wonderfully powerful
and intelligent as some devotees of the
secret rays say (and believe) he knew
that two billion would not have lain there
all that time it did. Too, if such as this
Da Sylva had been doing her duty by the
allies, instead of plundering along under-
ground, she could have been in Japan; her
rays would have seen this information of
the two billion dollars bullion sunk in the
harbor, and she would have acquired the
money, for no one but the Japs knew it
was there for months. He wondered how
many proud and lazy ray were cursing
their timid failure to invade Japan with
the surface soldiers, when they read this
item of missed loot in the papers.

But then, it might have been some loyal
young fighter like Saba who had uncovered
the stuff for the Yank soldiers. And it
might have been their absence from the
home caverns that laid the ancient place
open to such as Da Sylva, their absence
fighting on the front; unseen, unknown,
unheralded — but fighting with the vast an-
cient mystery mech for their country which
did not even know they existed. It was
hard to reconcile their activities, if that
was true, with their continued deprivation
of such medically valuable information
from suffering people the world over. This
ancient secret, this time-forgotten monop-
oly, why did it go on? Lane looked back
at Eemeeshee, snoring peacefully in his
dream, and knew why.

Because those time-pampered, God-mech
raised creatures who should have been like
Gods; worshipped pleasure — were raised
never to make an effort by the ancient all-
providing living machines.

The Elder race must have had some
stimulus from nature or from their own
wisdom that the past of such as Eemeeshee
did not have in their life. Else they would
not have been the Elder race; they would
have been such as Eemeeshee, and they
would never have produced the mech that
had made life so easy for Eemeeshee, and
there would have been no Eemeeshe, and
no necessity for struggling against the more
evil groups of the caverns.

## Chapter IX

**CHAPTER IX**

**Victory for the Red Legion**

AS THEY advanced, fire from the re-
maining outposts kept harrassing them.
.Not hitting much, but dangerously close,
firing blindly as they were through Eemee-
shee's opacity ray making the rock imper-
vious to the penetray vibrants. Slowly,
steadily, they found the source of those
rays and wiped them out with flashing
blasts of flaming energy through the re-
sisting rock.

They could hear Da Sylva screaming
thought-orders, her thought-voice like a
banshee's anger in her desperation. It was
a good feeling to hear that cruel voice
facing death. It was good to know she was
not relishing the last pangs of some long-
tortured "creep" or slave human worker
of hers.

At last she, too, fell unconscious under
a bolt from Saba's ray, and the far outposts
fell silent. They could hear over the
telaug beams their frantic thoughts as they
scrambled into the gravity defying hemi-
spheres and shot away along the great
cavern roads. Half their forces set out in
pursuit, the other half made sure there
were no traps, and took over Da Sylva's
central chamber and her own garishly re-
vulsive self.

Eemeeshee looked long and ponderingly
upon Deliar Da Sylva's sleek, yet gross
and revolting body. Her fate, what should
it be, what could he do to punish her, as
Eemeeshee's enemies were supposed to be
punished of old time?

The others under Saba's swift thought-
voice supervision took over the controls of
the central master rays and swept the whole
cavern labyrinth with a vast crisscross of
seeking rays to make quite sure that the
fight was really over and no man lying out
in the dark for one overturning treacherous

124

AMAZING STORIES

sweep of deadly ray when all their "shorter"
ray fans were off and they were unsus-
pecting.

Lane had time for one long sigh of relief,
realizing that the fear that had plagued and
killed his Red Legion was now gone. But
why, why had Da Sylva sent killers on
the trail of the Legion? Lane resolved to
find out!

Lane sent his own telaug beam from his
floating car upon Da Sylva's now half-
conscious head. As that awful sub-con-
scious thought was augmented into over-
whemingly loud impulses within his mind
a terrible revulsion at even hearing what
she thought took place. It was like read-
ing Satan's mind, if Satan was a woman.

The things she had done, the terrible
ideas that showed now to Lane as great
images of reality of the past, were filtered
and changed by time, but augmented by
the telaug into reality again. The scenes
of her past fascinated him as a bird is
fascinated by a snake, for Lane did not
know that the telaug cannot be used at
too great strength for long periods with-
out hypnosis, or he had forgotten Saba's
warning in his first shocked mental immer-
sion into evil female thought now taking
place within his own mind more strongly
than his own pale unaugmented thought.
It was strange to feel oneself a woman, an
evil, passionate, lusting, cruel and bloody
woman with a past that Bluebeard would
have envied. Strange and fascinating, for
the joy of her mind in her past was relived
by Da Sylva as she realized she had not
long to live. Thankfully came her thought.

"Anyway, I got mine while the getting
was good!"

SUDDENLY into that garishly distorted
beauty where the handiwork of this
Da Sylva bunch had managed to alloy
the original ancient beauty and the bar-
baric Indian additions of a different kind
of charm with an overlay of modern gaudi-
ness; into that scene of victory and ven-
geance came a mighty voice over a green
beam of terrific power.

"Eemeeshee, I am Mexitli. You have
brought war to people under my protection.
I must kill you, Eemeeshee, even though
you are of the old race. I cannot allow this
insult.

Eemeeshee, whose beet-red apoplectic
face had resumed its normal pallor through
his unconscious fit and his subsequent

awakening to a victory he had failed to con-
tribute much to winning, suddenly went a
beet red again, his great arms began to
quiver, his lips to drool and tremble. Even
Lane could see through the common ray
trick, but the mighty Eemeeshee — no, he
had to believe everything he heard. Some
fleeing enemy had decided to make one
more try at besting them — had flung an
unobserved telaug beam into the chambers
of Da Sylva and had carefully searched
Eemeeshee's mind for his one greatest fear.
Finding this fear in his memories of some
feared enemy of the past, he had imitated
the nature of this Mexitili — the voice at
first— and now into the chamber came a
great solidograph projection of the figure
of this fake "Mexitli". Even Lane under-
stood the nature of the ruse. This new
enemy had seen the image in Eemeeshee's
thought, had caught the thing with the
antique thought recorder attachment, was
now reprojecting the image from Eemee-
shee's own mind. But not Eemeeshee — oh
no. If some one said something, he had to
believe it.

Lane understood now why Secumne had
been so discouraged with the character of
these creatures of Eemeeshee's kind. His
great face purple with fear and upset cir-
culation, his trembling hands sought the
great control levers of his crystal mechan-
ism. The anti-gravs lifted it, slowly at first,
then rapidly, the great shining machine
floated off down the corridor, swung into
the wide ways toward the south. Deaf to
all their shouted entreaties over their rays
as they watched this craven flight of their
leader from a mere voice and projection,
Emeeshee's great floating temple of for-
gotten machinery began to speed away from
them, was soon lost to their following
search rays.

Meanwhile Saba, taking it all in with a
half smile of sad understanding on her face,
swung the huge rays from the war-ray
chamber of Da Sylva's where she had re-
mained with four stalwarts of the Legion to
insure that the great old mech were prop-
erly manned. Swung them searching the
distance for the origin of this fake voice
and picture which had cost them their
leader. Swung them, and, with gathering
doubt and indecision on her face, failed to
find the source.

Something that Eemeeshee was thinking
as he fled puzzled Lane.

"Mexitli is a messenger from Apollo.

THE RED LESION

125

Mexitli is an Apollo."

"Just what did Eemeeshee mean by men-
tioning Apollo? Just what did Eemeeshee
mean by mentioning the name Apollo?
How could he know anything about a God
moderns think Greek?" Saba turned to
Lane, saying,

"I will show you our Apollo records
from the past. Apollo was a God known
all over earth when he was here, and he is
well known to Eemeeshee from his dream
life — which is made up of records, is in
truth a reliving of the ancient God life.
That is why he is so frightened. The com-
ing of Mexitli is to him a sign of Apollo's
anger. He would not be frightened, but
long immersion in the record dream life has
made him unable to think of such things
as in the past. To him they are very much
today, and he is frightened of Mexitli who
was a very vengeful follower of Apollo.
Sometime I will show you records of that
time when Apollo was on earth."

"All that is not much help to us. We are
now in grave danger without Eemeeshee's
help to us. Whoever is doing the faking
that scared Eemeeshee off must have some
idea of following up the fake with an attack.
We've got to find him first."

"We shall." Saba was grim, and her
women hastened about on her thought
orders, too fast for Lane to hear or under-
stand what she was telling them.

NOW, from the projection of the terrible
figure of Mexitli, a tall black-feath-
ered giant of horrific aspect, his mouth a
great, fanged cavern in his painted face, his
hands holding strange instruments — from
this grotesque figure from the far past of
the Amerind domination of cavern life —
came streamers of pale fire out upon them.
Stronger and stronger grew these pale
streamers of fire, and pain and heat began
to drive them back from proximity to the
great and growing, solid-seeming appari-
tion.

Saba shouted to Lane.

"Do not fear or flee. If he could kill with
the mech he has activated he would do so.
He may cause pain and discomfort, but I
doubt he can kill — or he would."

Again that terrible voice from the past
flung its weird thought-pictures at us from
the apparition, saying:

"One every day. Now it will be one
every minute, till you flee again as before.
I am not what you think. Die, dogs of

Indians, die! You are not men. Your
leader flees. You are shameless cowards.
Flee! Flee!"

Even as Lane absorbed the abstract mes-
sage and made it into words in his mind,
a long streamer wrapped around Stevens
from head to foot. He dropped to the floor,
writhing and shrieking in agony. Lane
leaped forward, seized Stevens' shoulders,
dragged him back from the pale, painful
fire of the rays.

They had not bothered to bind or im-
prison the woman Da Sylva or her com-
panion, and in the chamber with Lane
were only Saba, Stevens and two or three
of the Red Legion. They had depended
on the many ray beams from the ray cham-
bers they had occupied on holding such
captives. For it is impossible for a person
to run away from a ray; its vast range
makes the attempt somewhat like that of an
ant trying to run away from a tidal wave.
It just can't be done.

But with Eemeeshee fleeing in the dis-
tance, and most of the ray mech engaged
in hunting for the source of the -Mexitli
projection, Da Sylva heaved her heavy
body into one of the empty half-spheres,
followed by Miro, and made the attempt
anyway. They did not notice her till
she was some distance down the long cor-
ridor leading to the ancient highway toward
the north.

Lane sprang to the stationary ray instal-
lation in the big chamber and sent Da
Sylva's own ray after her, flashed a bolt
into the drive mech of the car, stopped it,
smoking, dead, about a mile down the cor-
ridor. Other than that, they found no
time to bother with the two women, left
them trudging on foot toward the highway.
They would have time later to pick them
up. Meanwhile this new menace had to be
dealt with.

Da Sylva found another abandoned
grav-car and made good her escape — thanks
to the confusion. They were to pay for
their carelessness with this she-scorpion.

SABA at last traced the tenuous projec-
tion beam to its source. Lane, watch-
ing, was puzzled to find several ragged,
dirty workmen in a, great ray chamber,
manipulating the telesolidograph expertly.
Saba sent a telaug beam into the chamber
asking,
"Who are you?"

In their minds the answer "Votan war-

126

AMAZING STORIES

riors" flashed inadvertently and Saba
shouted in sudden glad understanding.
These were some of the original Indian peo-
ple who had held these caverns before the
advent of Da Sylva; had not known of the
retiring Eemeeshee far to the north; did
not recognize the men of the Red Legion
as allies. Able to kill, they yet were thank-
ful to the Red Legion for driving out Da
Sylva and freeing them, but at the same
time they saw an opportunity to wrest from
this struggle their old supremacy and had
sent the projection of Mexitli into the
chamber to frighten off Eemeeshee.

Their cunning analysis of Eemeeshee's
nature and the effectiveness of their bug-
a-boo in accomplishing their object were
interesting to us, but Saba explained that
we had come only to set them free; had
no designs on their possessions or homes.

Soon they joined Saba in Da Sylva 's cen-
tral chamber and helped to enlist the others
of the surviving Votan who were found
fleeing their bondage in all directions, now
that their cruel guards had gone.

That night found the whole system of
caverns under this area of Montana under ,
our domination, and the slow swinging
watch-rays covering every great old tun-
nel road from the north and east; others
watching too the other highways in case
danger came from some of the Da Sylva
outfit who might have circled to attack
again from some unexpected direction. But
all seemed quiet, and it was a triumphant
Red Legion and a rejoicing band of Votan
ex-slaves who bedded down that night in
those magnificent old chambers. Da Sylva
had made good her escape, and they
thought no more of her. But should have,
for Da Sylva was not through. In the
middle of the night a choking sensation
waked Saba, her eyes in the darkness un-
naturally sensitized by some fear, saw, as
only Saba could see in such darkness by
some sixth sense, the clouds of strange
choking gas flooding the chambers, billow-
ing down the corridors. She leaped to the
great vision screen and sent the central
master ray of the great fortification circling
in search of this strange threat.

It was true. Billowing down the corri-
dors from the north came a strange gas,
and choking and gasping, fleeing before the
rolling billows of death, came the hundreds
of Votans who had bedded in the northern
chambers; came also the men set to watch
the northern guard rays in their automatic

sweep of the northern highways. Compre-
hension came swiftly to Saba, and she woke
all the sleeping men, swiftly told them to
prepare to flee from their hard-won vic-
tory. Lane standing now beside Saba,
seeking a way to understand what was hap-
pening, heard her mutter:

"The teleports — she left one in these
caverns set to receive, made her way north-
ward during the distraction of the Votan
attack, and now, as we sleep, has placed
some ancient gas from the storerooms of
the Elder race into the sending chamber of
some abandoned teleport in the northern
ways, sending into our area vast quantities
of the ancient gas. Luckily it does not seem
very deadly . . ."

Lane answered her unconscious speech.

"The gas is cyanogen chloride. It is
deadly enough if it gets dense enough, and
in these close quarters it is insupportable.
Can you not blow it back upon them in
some way? Are there no air pumps, noth-
ing to rid ourselves of the gas? What are
you saying of teleports? I do not under-
stand . . ."

"There is no time. If we had time, we
could set men at getting the ancient pumps
in running order to clear the air, but with
the gas rolling down upon us, all I see is
flee while there is time. As the gas dis-
sipates, we can return to these caverns as
quickly as Da Sylva. She must think us
fools to think that we will not."

OVER her telaug, swiftly flashing from
group to group to group of our men,
Saba gave the order to evacuate immedi-
ately.

That retreat, heartsick at their losses,
plagued by the pursuing demoniacs under
Da Sylva's raging thought-voice control
whipping them to suicidal efforts to reach
them with their equally ranged weapons,
made their efforts to protect their rear
costly. Steadily the Red Legion paid for
their temerity in attacking Da Sylva — with
their blood. Continually the fleshy, venge-
ful witch sacrificed mindless ro after ro to
get within range, shoving a mass of speeding
floating spheres ahead here while over there
in adjacent parallel corridors, overhead, or
deep underneath, sped forward single ray-
cars in an enedavor to distract their watch-
ray from one or the other long enough to
get in a shot.

Da Sylva's numbers, steadily augmented
by her now returning men, speeding up

THE RED LEGION

127

from the far-flung frontiers of her holdings
to take their place in the battle line, were
now equal to their own. And their inexpe-
rience proved no match for the mindless ro,
who under control from the many control
beams from the cars of Da Sylva's hench-
men, were each as capable in handling the
ray as the veterans controlling their
thought.

Steadily their losses grew, car by car they
fell into smouldering wreckage, faster and
faster the panic stricken Red Men fled
before them.

Silently Lane cursed the non-existent
spine of the great old bag of wind, Eemee-
shee.

"Breath-Master" indeed! He must have
gotten that name from bragging of exploits
he was too timid to have done, or from his
short-winded and continual puffing over the
augmented telaug beams, heard by the
Indians of the surface long ago, rather than
from any mastery of the winds of fate and
the heavens as he had supposed.

Death flamed after them from near a
thousand lances of the red-flaming dis-
needles, and ever and again one of his loyal
Red Legion shrieked as the needles sought
through his body for a fatal spot. On they
fled, the levers setting the anti-grav beams
into the forward-driving slant in the last
notch. Nothing but the auto-ray eyes con-
trolled them from plunging into the curves
of the cavern ways. The silent, gleaming
dust-laden beauty of the mighty, earth
crust supporting pillars of the hardened
rock of the Elder's creation fled past them
in terrible rushing rows, the eye could not
follow the whirling march of the pillared,
time-heavy vastness past into the dark.

Steadily Lane searched the backward
trail with his beam at full extension focus,
firing, firing, and at every blast some car
of Da Sylva's flamed into hurtling fiery
death, left a smoudering, crushing wreck
against the cavern wall. Lane thought,
each car he destroyed, what a surface engi-
neering corporation would pay for just one
of the gadgets with which those cars were
crammed — and he had to destroy the inval-
uable ancient work to live on, to save any-
thing for future man. He must live. This
destroying nemesis behind them must die.

But they had one ace in the hole which
Lane was counting on Da Sylva having
failed to note. Before leaving their own
area, Lane and Saba had posted some thirty
men and the remainder of the women in

their own master ray chambers. These great
beams, which they knew would cover some
fifty miles of their route at full extension,
constituted a place to run to very definitely.
As they neared these caverns which were
familiar, near to Eemeeshee's home, Lane
sent his telaug beam far ahead, kept scream-
ing a warning to these few remaining stay-
at-homes, who were their last resort now.
Their children, their women, their homes,
and this home-guard ray, were their last
hope. As he flashed past an outpost of this
small force — one John Flannery, a half-
breed Indian of Irish parentage — Lane
shouted at him, where he crouched over the
ancient mech.

"Give them the works, John, in the
fourth passage."

There were four main highways from the
north, their flight and attempts at evasion
had taken them into the third of these,
while Da Sylva had continued with her
main force down the fourth, which in the
end reached the same goal. Lane had often
speculated on the "age" of this fourth
passage, which seemed of different and older
construction than the other three; was per-
haps the first of the many great borings
made by the elder race in this area.

Flannery, big red-haired and high-cheek-
boned, his blue eyes flashing a reassuring
message to John as he flashed past, began
at once to fire upon the Da Sylva cars.
His great old stationary mech gave off a ray
of vastly greater potential of destruction
than their own portable weapons, and his
solid, unshifting base of rock made his fire
more accurate. Lane shot on down the
great tube of rock toward the central ray
chambers to make sure the force there was
made aware of the turn of events.

But there was no need. They had been
watching, holding their fire until a sure kill
was in order; and at Flannery 's attack
upon Da Sylva, the vast old central mech
began to flame with power, over their heads
into the far ways flashed the mighty shafts
of death, and within minutes Da Sylva and
all her gang were things of the past, smoul-
dering piles of debris upon the forgotten
floors of the Titans' highways.

SABA, taking no chances, ordered at once
a return to the Votan caverns. Re-
duced to a fourth of their original number
by the reverses they had suffered, they were
not happy as they returned toward Mon-
tana's under-rock.

128

AMAZING STORIES

Again at the work of making the former
nest of Da Sylva a place safe for themselves,
Lane called a meeting of all of the surviv-
ing warriors. They stood before him,
weary, disheartened at their terrible losses;
behind them the ranks of the Votan, ragged,
starved wrecks of men; and in their faces
the knowledge that they expected of these
newcomers only a return to life and perhaps
freedom.

Lane realized he had to put heart and
hope into these men. He knew the Votans
understood English from their long watch-
ing of the growing civilization over their
heads on the surface; knew, too, that he
must not let them return to their old ways
of repressive hiding and non-development
that had made them easy conquest for Da
Sylva's gang.

From these few hundred grim-faced
weary men, Lane knew he had to build an
organization that would ever after make
the wisdom of the caverns safe for future
men. He lifted both hands in Indian
fashion:

"Men of the Red Race, this struggle
seems now to have cost too much. We
have paid too highly for what we have
won. But that is not true. Nowhere on
this dark earth does a band of men exist
who have won more for their fellow men
with their battle. Nowhere have the dead
paid with their lives for more than we have
won this day.

The Red Race has won here an oppor-
tunity to again become a great world power.
Here in this den of lust, here in these for-
gotten and disregarded caverns, we have
paid with our blood for a glorious future
for all men. We shall bring modern science
into these caverns, studying the ancient
science and bringing to us all the value of
the wisdom of the glorious race. If we
remain as one striving toward a greater
and more intelligent organization of red
men everywhere, these ancient machines
and rays, coupled with modern science,
will give the red man such power and
prestige as has not been his since the first
Spaniard drew sword in Mexico."

The Votan Indians, listening and realiz-
ing that here was a man and a leader dif-
ferent in aims from any they had known,
gave forth with a shout of approbation.
Lane continued, glad to see in their faces a
shining hope that had not been there before.

"You Votans, here in your former homes
as our allies and friends, will be not the

least pillar of the coming new order in the
underworld. As time goes on, and you
understand that the ancient ways of vege-
tating and doing nothing here in these
wonder caverns but enjoy the pleasure mech
of the Gods and sneer at the poor surface
people, are gone; that the modern red man
has a greater duty to man on earth and
the will to perform that duty. Then you
will find yourselves glad to be part of the
new Red Legion, a Red Legion using all
the mighty science of the Gods for building
a new way of life for all men.

## Afterword

AFTERWORD

THE REST OF this story the future of
the world will have to tell. The red men
of America are active in the caverns, some-
times ignorant, sometimes backward and
too worshipful of the age-old secrecy, but
also containing modern men of education
and the modern aims of all scientific men
everywhere. Even the "creeps" and those
people even more changed by the caverns
than the creeps, the spider men of the
western caverns, are not to be despised be-
cause of their knowledge of the wonder
world under the rocks of Mother Earth.
They will find a way to be useful as civiliza-
tion comes more and more swiftly to the
ancient savage ways of the backward life
of the underworld.

The Indians of the underworld are a
factor in the coming struggle for power over
Earth, and they have a knowledge of the
ancient secrets. They have in some areas
complete possession of and domination of
those mighty mechanisms of the Elder race.
Such battles as the one portrayed are taking
place in the west today between the white
ray and the red; between modern ray
people and those who cling to the ancient
tradition of secrecy and suppression of all
surface peoples. It seems natural to assume
that the red men are on the side of progress,
on the side of surface sanity in promoting
study and use of the ancient Elder race
wisdom for surface men.

For those who seek more knowledge of
the Elder world I can tell you the red men
know much of it from their legends and
from such secret groups as the Red Legion,
the Black Legion and others. Whether
they will tell you about it is another thing.

The history of the Red Men in the cav-
erns is a fascinating thing. For the next
story I am going to select a figure you all

THE RED LEGION

129

think you know, but do you? Apollo. You
know all about him. You are wrong.
Apollo was a man who came from space,
and he came to the American continent in
the days when dinosaurs and similar
gigantics made life hazardous for the red
men. He came for the express purpose
of eliminating the serpent race from earth
to make way for his own experiments with
beneficial rays in making over the race of
men on earth toward his ideas of what men
should be. That is one reason Apollo has
remained as the epitome of masculine
beauty the world over. That is what he
was: the father of beauty in men. He made
it so by moulding men over into his heart's
desire. And to do it he held to take the
whole world apart. The next story is going

to be about Apollo; and it's plenty differ-
ent from what the school books tell you of
this "period. They all admit they don't
know much about it, don't they. Well, we
don't make that mistake. Our guess as to
what happened is plenty close — corrobora-
tions prove.

Apollo is a mighty figure in Indian legend
under many names. He came to the
American continent; he wiped out the
dinosaurs; he remade the race of men by
treating the reproductive portions of their
bodies with beneficial rays. By his science
he changed the world. Where he came from
we don't know, but we know what he did
here pretty well. And it doesn't all come
from Oahspe. There are many other
sources of this view of Apollo.