327CHAPTER XXVIIILIGHT IN THE DARKNESS
Ashton again turned his face to the rock and groaned. God had answered his prayer. Now must he pay the price. If only he could force himself to lie still while the rising waters brimmed up over the ledge and up over his head and face. He was tired––tired! It would be so peaceful to lie and rest under the quiet waters.
But the first ripple that crept over the surface of the shelf brought him to his feet with the chill of its icy touch. He climbed to a shelf higher up and again stretched himself full length on the rock. To lie still and rest was heavenly.... It was too good to last. The water crept after him up the ledge. This time he could climb no higher.
He sat erect and waited, still resting, until the flood rose to his chin. Then he stood up, leaning on the battered level rod. The water rose after him, creeping with relentless stealth from his thigh to his waist, from his waist to his chest. It would soon be lapping at his throat, and then––he must begin to swim. Life was far stronger within him than he had thought.328His strength had come back. Blake was right. A man should fight. He should hold fast to hope, and fight to the very last.
Something swept from side to side along the face of the cliff above him. It tapped the rock close over his head. He looked up and saw a rope. He could not see over the rounded brink of the cliff, but he had no need. There was a rescuer above him who knew his desperate situation. Could it be Blake? Surely not! He must have perished in the frightful vortex of the tunnel.
The rope swung lower. Now it was within reach. Ashton made a clutch as it swept over him and caught its end. He gave a tug. At once the line slackened down to him. He felt something in his palm, twisted between the rope strands. He looked and saw that it was a piece of folded paper. He opened it and found written a terse sentence in Blake’s bold clear hand:
Tie rod to line and climb.
Why should he tie the splintered level rod to the rope? Of what possible use could it be in climbing the precipices? But even while Ashton asked himself the questions he obeyed Blake’s directions. The water lapped up over his chin as he tied the knot. He pulled heavily on the rope. It gave a little way, and then tautened. He reached up and began to climb, hand over hand, with desperate speed.
Another desperate clutch at the rope––still another
Another desperate clutch at the rope––still another
329
Thirty feet above the water his strength was almost outspent, but he struggled to raise himself one more time, and then another. To pause meant to slip back and perish. Another upward heave. The rope here bent in over the rounding cliff. Hardly could he force his fingers between it and the rock. Yet if only he could get his knee up on the sharp slope! He heaved again, his face purple with exertion, the veins swelling out on his forehead as if about to burst.
At last! his knee was up and braced against the rock. Another desperate clutch at the rope––another heave––still another. The cliff edge was rounding back. Every upward hitch was easier than the one before. Now he was scrambling up on toes and knees; now he could rise to his feet.
The line led across a waterworn ledge and downward. Ashton peered over, and saw the senseless body of Blake wedged against the other side of the ledge. About it, close below the arms, the line was knotted fast.
Ashton stared wonderingly at the still, white face of the unconscious man. It was covered with cold sweat. A peculiar twist in the sprawling left leg caught his attention. He looked––and understood. Panting with exertion, he staggered down the ledges of the lower side of the barrier to where the river burst furiously out of the mouth of the tunnel.
Hurled by that mad torrent from the darkness of the330gorged cavern straight upon a line of rocks, all Blake’s strength and quickness had not enabled him to save himself from injury. Yet he had crept up those rough ledges, dragging his shattered leg. Atrocious as must have been his agony, he had crept all the way to the top, had written the note, and flung down the rope to rescue his companion.
There was no vessel in which Ashton could carry water. He had no hat, his boots were full of holes, he must use his hands in scrambling back up the ledges. He stripped off his tattered flannel shirt, dipped it in a swirling eddy, and started back as fast as he could climb.
Blake still lay unconscious. Ashton straightened out the twisted leg, and knelt to bathe the big white face with an end of the dripping garment. After a time the eyelids of the prostrate man fluttered and lifted, and the pale blue eyes stared upward with returning consciousness.
“I’m here!” cried Ashton. “Do you see? You saved me!”
“Colt’s gone,” muttered Blake. “But cartridges––fire.”
“You mean, fire the cartridges to let them know where we are? How can I do it without the revolver?”
“No, build a fire,” replied the engineer. He raised a heavy hand to point towards the high end of the331barrier. “Driftwood up there. Bring it down. I’ll light it.”
“Light it––how?” asked Ashton incredulously.
“Get it,” ordered Blake.
Ashton hurried across the crest of the barrier to where it sloped up and merged in the precipice foot. The mass of rock that formed the barrier had fallen out of the face of the lower part of the cañon wall, leaving a great hollow in the rock. But above the hollow the upper precipices beetled out and rose sheer, on up the dizzy heights to the verge of the chasm. Contrasted with this awesome undermined wall, the broken, steeple-sloped precipices adjoining it on the upstream side looked hopefully scalable to Ashton. He marked out a line of shelves and crevices running far up to where the full sunlight smiled on the rock.
But Blake had told him to fetch wood for a fire, that they might signal the watchers on the heights. He hastened up over the rocks to the heaps of logs and branches stranded on the high end of the barrier by the freshets. Every year the river, swollen by the spring rains, brimmed over the top of this natural dam.
Yet not all the heaps lying on the ledges were driftwood. As Ashton approached, he was horrified to see that the largest and highest situated piles were nothing else than masses of bones. Drawn by a gruesome fascination, he climbed up to the nearest of the ghastly heaps. The loose ribs and vertebræ scattered down332the slope seemed to him the size of human ribs and vertebræ. He shuddered as they crunched under his tread.
Then he saw a skull with spiral-curved horns. He looked up the cañon wall, and understood. The high-heaped bones were the skeletons of sheep. In a flash, he remembered Isobel’s account of Gowan, that first day up there on the top of the mesa. Not only had the puncher killed six men; he had, together with other violent men of the cattle ranges, driven thousands of sheep over into the cañon––and this was the place.
Sick with horror and loathing, Ashton ran to snatch up an armful of the smaller driftwood and hurry back down to the center of the barrier. He found Blake lying white and still. But beside him were three cartridges from which the bullets had been worked out. At the terse command of the engineer, Ashton ground one of the older and drier pieces of wood to minute fragments on a rock.
Blake emptied the powder from one of the cartridges into the little pile of splinters, and holding the edge of another shell against a corner of the rock, tapped the cap with a stone. At the fifth stroke the cap exploded. The loosened powder of the cartridge flared out into the powder-sprinkled tinder. Soon a fire of the dry, half-rotted driftwood was blazing bright and almost smokeless in the twilight of the depths.333
“Now haul up the rod,” directed Blake, and he lay back to bask in the grateful warmth.
Ashton drew up the level rod and came back over the ledge. He found that the engineer had freed himself from the last coils of the rope and was unraveling the end that had been next his body. But his eyes were upturned to the heights.
“Look––the flag!” he said.
“Already?” exclaimed Ashton.
“Yes. No doubt one of them has been waiting on that out-jutting point.––Now, if you’ll break the rod. We’ve got to get my leg into splints.”
The crude splints were soon ready. For bandages there were strips from the tattered shirts of both men. Unraveled rope-strands, burnt off in the fire, served to lash all together. Beads of cold sweat gathered and rolled down Blake’s white face throughout the cruel operation. Yet he endured every twist and pull of the broken limb without a groan. When at last the bones were set to his satisfaction and the leg lashed rigid to the splints, he even mustered a faint smile.
“That beats an amputation,” he declared. “Now if you can help me up under the cliff, where you can plant the fire against a back-log––I want to dry out and do some planning while you’re climbing up for help. I’ve an idea we can put in a dynamo down here, with turbines in the intake and in the mouth of the tunnel––carry a wire up over the top of the mesa334and down into the gulch. Understand? All the electric power we want to drive the tunnel, and very cheap.”
“My God!” gasped Ashton. “You can lie here––here––maimed, already starving––and can plan like that?”
“Why not? No fun thinking of my leg, is it? As for the rest, you’re going up to report the situation. They’ll soon manage to yank me out of this blessed hole.”
Ashton’s face darkened. “But that’s the question,” he rejoined. “Am I going to go up? Am I going to try to go up?”
Blake looked at him with a steady, unflinching gaze. “There’s something queer about all this. Isn’t it time you explained? When the rope came off that last cliff in the gorge and I saw that you had untied it before sliding down, I thought you were off your head. And two or three times today, too. But since we landed here––”
“Your broken leg,” interrupted Ashton––“it made me forget. You had saved me with the rope. I had to help you. Now I see how foolish I have been. I should have left you to lie here, and flung myself back over into the water.”
“Why?” calmly queried Blake.
“Why! You ask why?” cried Ashton, his eyes ablaze with excitement, his whole body quivering.335“Can’t you see? Are you blind? What do I care about myself if I can save her from you? I shall not try to escape. You shall never go up there to work her harm!”
“Harm her? You mean put through this irrigation project?”
“No!” shouted Ashton. “Don’t lie and pretend, you hypocrite! You know what I mean! You know she could not hide how you were enticing her!”
Blake stared in utter astonishment. Then, regardless of his leg, he sat up and said quietly: “I see. I thought you must have understood when she told me, there at the last moment before we started. She is my sister.”
“Sister!” scoffed Ashton. “You liar! You have no sister. Your sisters died years ago. Genevieve told me.”
“That was what I told her. I believed it true. But it was not true. Belle did not die––God! when I think of that! It has helped me through this fight––it helped me crawl up here with that leg dangling. Good God! To think of Jenny waiting for me up there, and Son, and little Belle too––little Belle whom all these years I thought dead!”
Ashton stood as if turned to stone. “Belle––you call her Belle? She told me––Chuckie only a nickname!” he stammered. “Adopted––her real name Isobel!”336
“We always called her Belle––Baby Belle! She was the youngest,” said Blake.
“But why––why did you not––tell me?”
“I did not know. She did––she knew from the first, there at Stockchute. I see it now. Even before that, she must have guessed it. Yes, I see all now. She sent for me to come out here, because she thought I might be her brother.”
“You did not tell me!” reproached Ashton, his face ghastly. “How was I to know?”
“I tell you, I did not know,” repeated Blake. “At first––yes, all along––there was something about her voice and face––But she had changed so much, and all these years––eight, nine years––I had thought her dead. She gave me no sign––only that friendliness. I did not know until the very last moment, there on the edge of the ravine. I thought you saw it; that you heard her tell me. It seemed to me everybody must have heard.”
“I was running away––I could not bear it. I think I must have been crazy for a time. If only I had heard! My God! if only I had heard!”
“Well, you know now,” said Blake. “What’s done is done. The question now is, what are you going to do next?”
Instantly Ashton’s drooping figure was a-quiver with eagerness.
“You wish first to be taken up near the driftwood,”337he exclaimed. “Let me lift you. Don’t be afraid to put your weight on me. Hurry! We must lose no time!”
Blake was already struggling up. Ashton strained to help him rise erect on his sound leg. Braced and half lifted by the younger man, the engineer hobbled and hopped along the barrier crest and up its sloping side. His trained eye picked out a great weather-seasoned pine log lying directly beneath the outermost point of the cañon rim. An object dropped over where the flag still flecked against the indigo sky, would have fallen straight down to the log, unless deflected by the prong of a ledge that jutted out twelve hundred feet from the top.
“Here,” panted Blake, regardless of the great pile of skeletons heaped on the far end of the log. “This place––right below them! Go back––bring fire and rope.”
Ashton ran back to fetch the rope and a dozen blazing sticks. Driftwood was strewn all around. In a minute he had a fire started against the butt end of the log. He began to gather a pile of fuel. But Blake checked him with a cheerful––“That’s enough, old man. I can manage now. Take the rope, and go.”
When Ashton had coiled the rope over his shoulder and under the opposite arm, he came and stood before his prostrate companion. His face was scarlet with shame.338
“I have been a fool––and worse,” he said. “I doubted her. I am utterly unfit to live. If I were alone down here, I would stay and rot. But you are her brother. If it is possible to get up there, I am going up.”
“You are going up!” encouraged Blake. “You will make it. Give my love to them. Tell them I’m doing fine.”
He held out his hand.
“No,” said Ashton. “I’d give anything if I could grip hands with you. But I cannot. You are her brother. I am unfit to touch your hand.”
He turned and ran up the precipice-foot to the first steep ascent of the steeple-sloped break in the wall of the abyss.
339CHAPTER XXIXTHE CLIMBER
A day of anxiety, only partly relieved by those tiny flashes of light so far, far down in the awful depths; then the long night of ceaseless watching. Neither Genevieve nor Isobel had been able to sleep during those hours when no flash signaled up to them from the abysmal darkness.
Then at last, a full hour after dawn on the mesa top, the down-peering wife had caught the flash that told of the renewal of the exploration. As throughout the previous day, Gowan brought the ladies food and whatever else they needed. Only the needs of the baby had power to draw its mother away from the cañon edge. Isobel moved always along the giddy verge wherever she could cling to it, following the unseen workers in the depths.
On his first trip to the ranch, the puncher had brought Genevieve’s field glasses––an absurdly small instrument of remarkable power. Three times the first day and twice the second morning she and Isobel had the joy of seeing their loved ones creeping along the abyss bottom at places where the sun pierced down340through the gloom. They missed other chances because the cañon edge was not everywhere so easily approachable.
Many times the flash of Blake’s revolver passed unseen by them. Sometimes they had been forced away from the brink; sometimes the depths were cut off from their view by juttings of the vast walls. Yet now and again one or the other caught a flash that marked the advance of the explorers.
Towards midday a last flash was seen by both above the turn where the cañon curved to run towards Dry Fork Gulch. Between this point and the sharp bend opposite the gulch the precipices overhung the cañon bottom. Carrying the baby, the two hastened to the bend, to heap up and light a great beacon fire of green wood.
Gowan followed with the ponies, cool, silent and efficient. From the first he had seldom looked over into the cañon. His part was to serve Miss Chuckie and her friend, and wait. Like Ashton, he had failed to surmise the real significance of that tender parting between Blake and Isobel. His look had betrayed boundless amazement when he saw the wife of the man take the sobbing girl into her arms and comfort her. But he had spoken no word of inquiry; and every moment since, both ladies had been too utterly absorbed in their watch to talk to him of anything else.
At last the exploration was nearing the turning point.341Genevieve and Isobel lay on the edge of the precipice near the beacon fire, peering down for the flash that would tell of the last rod reading.
Slowly the minutes dragged by, and no welcome signal flashed through the dark shadows. The usual interval between shots had passed. Still no signal. They waited and watched, with fast-mounting apprehension. Could the brave ones down in those fearsome depths have failed almost in sight of the goal? or could misfortune have overtaken them in that narrow, cavernous reach of the chasm so close to their objective point?
At last––“There! there it is!”
Together the two watchers saw the flash, and together they shrieked the glad discovery.
Genevieve rose to go to her crying baby. Before she could silence him, Isobel screamed to her: “Another shot!––farther downstream! What can it mean?”
Genevieve put down the still-sobbing baby and ran again to the verge of the precipice. Two minutes after the second flash there came a third, a few yards still farther along the cañon.
“They have changed their plans. They are going downstream,” said Genevieve.
She caught up the long pole of the flag and ran to thrust it out opposite the point where she had seen the flash.342
Gowan was preparing for the return trip up along the cañon to the starting point. At Isobel’s call, he silently turned the ponies about the other way and followed the excited watchers. As he did so, the girl perceived a fourth flash in the abyss, a hundred yards farther downstream. She hastened with the flag to a point a little beyond the place.
When Genevieve had quieted the baby and overtaken Isobel, the latter was ready with a question: “You know Tom so well. Why is he going on down? He said that he would at once return after reaching the place where the head of the tunnel is to be.”
“He must have seen the beacon,” replied Genevieve. “He could not have mistaken that. Something has forced him to change his plans. It may be they were swept down some place in the river that he knows they cannot re-ascend.”
“Oh! do not say it!” sobbed the girl. “If they cannot get back––oh! what will they do? How will they ever escape?”
“Is there no other place?” asked Genevieve. “Think, dear. Is there no break in these terrible precipices?”
“There’s a place where the wall slopes back––but steep, oh, so steep! Yet it is barely possible––” The girl’s voice sank, and she glanced about at Gowan. “It is just this side of where more than five thousand sheep were driven over into the cañon. That was four343years ago. I have never since been able to go near the place.”
“Tom said that he rode all along the cañon for miles. You say it may be possible to climb up at that place. He must have seen it, and he has remembered it.”
“Then you think––?”
“I know that if it is possible for anyone to climb the wall, Tom will climb it––and he will bring up Lafayette with him.”
“Dear Genevieve! You are so strong! so full of hope!”
“Not hope, dear. It is trust. I know Tom better than you. That is all.”
“Another flash!” cried Isobel. “So soon, yet all that long way from the last! They are traveling far faster!”
“Yes, they have finished with the levels,” divined Genevieve. “We must hasten.”
Isobel called the news to the silent puncher, and all moved along to overtake the hurrying fugitives below. Though both parties went so much faster, Blake’s frequent shots kept the anxious watchers above in closer touch than at any time before.
At last they came to that Cyclopean ladder of precipices, rising one above the other in narrow steps, and all inclined at a giddy pitch far steeper than any house roof. Yet for a long way down them the field glasses344showed their surfaces wrinkled with shelves and projecting ledges and creased with faults and crevices.
The party went past this semi-break in the sheer wall, and halted on the out-jutting point of the rim where the luckless flock of sheep had been driven over to destruction. No reference was made to that ruthless slaughter of innocents. Gowan calmly set about preparing a camp. The ladies lay down to watch in the shade of a frost-cracked rock on the verge of the wall.
Already the time had come and gone for the regular signal of the revolver shot. The watchers began to grow apprehensive. Still their straining eyes saw no flash in the depths. A half hour passed. Their apprehension deepened to dread. An hour––they were white with terror.
Suddenly a tiny red spot appeared––not a flash that came and went like lightning, but a flame that remained and grew larger.
“A fire!” cried Isobel. “They have halted and built a fire.”
Genevieve brought the flag and thrust it out over the edge. The inner end of the pole she wedged in a crevice of the split rock.
“They have stopped to rest,” she said. “It may be that Lafayette is worn out. But soon I trust they will be coming up.”
She looked through her glasses. The fire was burning345its brightest. She discerned the prostrate figure beside the ledge. She watched it fixedly. Soon another figure appeared in the circle of firelight. It bent over the first, doing something with pieces of stick.
“Look,” whispered Genevieve, handing the glasses to her companion, “Tom is hurt. Lafayette is binding his leg. It is broken or badly strained.––Oh! will your father never come?”
“Tom hurt? It can’t be––no, no!” protested Isobel. But she too looked and saw. After a time she added breathlessly: “It can’t be so bad! Lafe is helping him to rise.... They are starting this way––to the foot of the wall! They will be climbing up!”
“But if his leg is injured!” differed Genevieve.
Again they waited. Presently the fire scattered, and a streak of flame traveled across the cañon to a point beneath them. Soon the red spot of a new fire glowed in the shadows so directly under them that a pebble dropped from their fingers must have grazed down the precipices and fallen into the flames.
After several minutes of alternate peering through the glasses, Genevieve handed them back to Isobel for the third time, and rose to go to her baby.
“It is Tom alone,” she said, divining the truth. “Lafayette has helped him to the best place they could find, and now he is coming up to us for help.”
When she had fed the baby and soothed him to346sleep, she laid out bandages and salve, set a full coffeepot on the fire started by Gowan, and examined the cream and eggs brought back by the puncher on his second night trip to the ranch.
Nearly an hour had passed when Isobel called in joyous excitement: “I see him! I see him! Down there where the sunlight slants on the rocks. Oh! how bravely! how swiftly he climbs!”
Genevieve went to take the glasses and look. Several moments were lost before she could locate the tiny figure creeping up that stairway of the giants. But, once she had fixed the glasses upon him, she could see him clearly. Isobel had well expressed it when she said that he was climbing swiftly and bravely. Running along shelves, clambering ledges, following up the crevices that offered the best foothold, the tattered climber fought his dizzy way upwards, upwards, ever upwards!
Rarely, after some particularly hard scramble, he flung himself down on a shelf or on one of the steps of the Titanic ladder, to rest and summon energy for another upward rush. His good fortune seemed as marvelous as his endurance and daring. He never once slipped and never once had to turn back from an ascent. As if guided by instinct or divine intuition, he chose always the safest, the least difficult, the most continuously scalable way on all that perilous pitch.
So swift an ascent was beyond the ordinary powers347of man. It could have been made only by a maniac or by one to whom great passion had given command of those latent forces of the body that enable the maniac to fling strong men about like children. Long before the climber reached the top of that terrible ladder, his hands were torn and bleeding, the tattered garments were half rent from his limbs and body, his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets.
Yet ever he climbed, ledge above ledge, crevice after crevice, until at last only one steep pitch rose above him. A rope came sliding down the rock. A voice––the sweetest voice in all the wide world of sunshine and life––called to him. It sounded very far away, farther than the bounds of reality, yet he heard and obeyed. He slipped the loop of the rope down over his shoulders and about his heaving forebody. Then suddenly his labor was lightened. His leaden body became winged. It floated upwards.
When he came to himself, a bitter refreshing wetness was soothing his parched mouth and black swollen tongue; gentle fingers were spreading balm on his torn hands; the loveliest face of earth or heaven was downbent over him, its tender blue eyes brimming with tears of compassion and love. Softly his head and shoulders were raised, and hot coffee was poured down his throat as fast as he could swallow.
He half roused from his daze. The swollen, cracked lips moved in faintly muttered words: “Leg348broken––sends love––doing fine––project feasible––irrigation––no food––must rest––go down again.”
The eyes of the two ministering angels met. Genevieve bent down and pressed her lips to the purple, swollen-veined forehead. The heavy lids closed over the sunken eyes; but before he lapsed into the torpid sleep of exhaustion that fell upon him, the two succeeded in feeding him several spoonfuls of raw egg beaten in cream. He then sank into utter unconsciousness.
Flaccid and inert as a corpse, he lay outstretched on the grassy slope while they bound up the cuts and bruises on his naked arms and shoulders and cut the broken, gaping boots from his bruised feet. His legs, doubly protected by the tough leather chapareras and thick riding leggins, had fared less cruelly than his arms, but his knees were raw and bleeding where the chaps had worn through on the rocks.
349CHAPTER XXXLURKING BEASTS
The moment that he had helped haul the climber to safety Gowan had ridden away with the horses to the camp. He now came jogging back with the tent and all else that they had not been carrying with them in their skirting of the cañon edge. He unloaded the packs and hastened to pitch the tent.
As he was finishing, Isobel called to him sharply. “What are you doing there, Kid? That can wait. Come here.”
“Yes, Miss Chuckie,” he replied with ready obedience. But when he came down the slope to the little group, his mouth was like a thin gash across his lean jaws. He stared coldly at Ashton between narrowed lids. “Want me to help tote him up by the fire?” he asked.
“No!” she replied. “It is Tom! He is down there––his leg broken––and no food! You must go down to him.”
“Go down?” queried the puncher. “What good would that do? I couldn’t help him with that climb. He weighs a good two hundred.”350
“You can take food down to him and let him know that help is coming. You must!”
Gowan looked sullenly at the unconscious man. “Sorry, Miss Chuckie. It’s no go. I ain’t a mountain sheep.”
“Buthecame up!”
“That’s different. It’s a sight easier going up cliffs than climbing down. No, you’ll have to excuse me, Miss Chuckie.”
The girl flamed with indignant anger. “You coward! You saw him come up, after all that time down in those fearful depths––after fighting his way all those miles along the terrible river––yet you dare not go down! You coward! you quitter!”
The puncher’s face turned a sickly yellow, and he seemed to shrink in on himself. His voice sank to a husky whisper: “You can say that, Miss Chuckie! Any man say it, he’d be dead before now. If you want to know, I’ve got a mighty good reason for not wanting to go down. It ain’t that I’m afraid. You can bank on that. It’s something else. I’ll go quick enough––but it’s got to be on one condition. You’ve got to promise to marry me.”
“Marry you?”
“Yes. You know how I’ve felt towards you all these years. Promise to marry me, and I’ll go to hell and back for you. I’ll do anything for you. I’ll save him!”351
“You cur! You’d force me to bargain myself to you!” she cried, fairly beside herself with righteous fury. “I thought you a man! You cur––you cowardly cur!”
Gowan turned from her and walked rapidly away along the cañon edge, his head hunched between his shoulders, his hands downstretched at his thighs, the fingers crooked convulsively.
“Oh!” gasped Genevieve. “You’ve driven him away! Call him back! We need him! He must go for help!”
The words shocked the girl out of her rash anger. Her flushed face whitened with fear. “Kid!” she screamed. “Come back, Kid! You must go to the ranch––bring the men!”
The cry of appeal should have brought him back to her on the run. It pierced high above the booming reverberations of the cañon. Yet he paid no heed. He neither halted nor paused nor even looked back. If anything, he hurried away faster than before.
“Kid! dear Kid! forgive me! Come back and help us!” shrieked the girl.
He kept on down along the cañon rim, his chin sunk on his breast, his downstretched hands bent like claws. She ran a little way after him; only to flutter back again, wringing her hands, distracted. “What shall we do? what shall we do?”
“Be quiet, dear––be quiet!” urged Genevieve.352“You’ve driven him away. We must do the best we can. You must go yourself. I can stay and watch––”
“No, no!” cried Isobel. “The way he looked at Lafe!––I dare not go! He may come back––and I not here!”
She knelt to place her trembling hand on Ashton’s forehead.
Genevieve looked at the setting sun. “There is no time to lose,” she said. “Saddle my horse while I nurse Baby. I cannot take him with me down the mountain, in the dark.”
“Genevieve! You dare go––at night?”
“Someone must bring help, else Tom––all alone down in that dreadful chasm––!”
“But you may lose the way! I will go!”
“No, no, you must stay, Belle. I saw his eyes. He may come back. I could not protect Lafayette, but you––There is no other way. I must leave Baby, and go.”
Wondering at the courage of the young mother, Isobel ran to saddle the oldest of the picketed horses. He was the slowest of them all, but he was surefooted and steady and very wise. When she brought him down the ridge, Genevieve placed the newly fed baby in her arms and went with the glasses to peer down the sheer precipices. There in the blackness so far beneath her the glowing fire illuminated an outstretched form. It was her husband, lying flat on his back and353gazing up at the heights. Almost she could fancy that he saw her as she saw him.
But she did not linger. Time was too precious. She dropped him a kiss, and ran to spring upon the waiting pony. She did not pause even to kiss the big-eyed baby. The thirsty pony needed no urging to start at a lively jog up the slope of the first ridge. As he topped the crest and broke into a lope the sun dipped below the western edge of High Mesa. A few seconds later horse and rider disappeared from Isobel’s anxious gaze down the far side of the ridge.
“Old Buck knows the trail,” murmured the girl. “He knows he is headed for the waterhole. Yet if––if heshouldlose the trail!”
A spasm of fear sent her hand to the pistol hilt under the fold of her skirt and twisted her head about. She glared along the cañon rim. Gowan was still striding away from her. She watched him fixedly, her hand clutched fast on the hilt of her pistol, until he disappeared around a mass of rocks.
The whinnying of the horses after their companion at last drew her attention. They had not been watered since the previous evening. Cuddling close the frightened baby, the girl fetched a basin and one of the water cans, to sponge out the dusty nostrils of the animals and give each two or three swallows.
Then, when she had soothed the fretful child to sleep, she laid him in a snug nest of blankets between354a rock and a fallen tree, and went to watch beside Ashton. He lay as she had left him, in a stupor of sleep and exhaustion.
Gradually the twilight faded. Stars began to twinkle in the cloudless sky. She watched and waited while the dusk deepened. When she could barely see objects a few yards away, she stooped over the unconscious man and, putting out all her supple young strength, half dragged, half carried him up the slope to a hiding place that she had chosen, in under an overhanging ledge. There she spread pine needles and blankets on the soft mold and lifted him upon them, so that nothing hard should press against his wounds.
The fire had burned low. It was a full hundred yards away from the hiding place. She went to replenish it and take a hasty look down at that outstretched form in the depths. But soon she stole back to the sleeping man under the rock, going, as she had come, by a roundabout way in the darkness.
Night settled down close and dense over the plateau. The girl crouched beside the sleeper, her eyes peering out into the blackness, the drawn pistol ready in her hand. She could see only a few feet in the dim starlight. But her ears, accustomed to the dull monotone of the booming cañon, heard every sound––the click of the horses’ hoofs, even the munching of the nearest one, the hoot of the owls that flitted overhead, the distant yelps and wails of coyotes.355
An hour passed, two hours––a third. She crept around to replenish the fire. When she returned she heard the baby fretting. Swiftly she groped her way to him and carried him to the hiding place, to quiet his outcry. He sucked in a little of the beaten egg and cream that she had ready for Ashton. It satisfied his hunger, and he fell asleep, clasped against her soft warm bosom. She crouched down with him in her lap, her right hand again clasped on the pistol hilt, ready for the expected attack.
She waited as before, silent, motionless, every sense alert. Another hour dragged by, and another. Midnight passed. Suddenly, on the ridge slope above her, one of the horses snorted and plunged. She raised the pistol. The horse became quiet. But something came gliding around the rocks, a low form vaguely outlined in the darkness. It might have been a creeping man. It turned towards the hiding place. The girl found herself looking into a pair of glaring eyes. She thrust out the pistol, with her forefinger pointing along the barrel. The darkness was too deep for her to aim by the sights.
Before she could press the trigger, the beast bounded away, with a snarl far deeper, far more ferocious than any coyote could have uttered. The girl did not fire. The wolf had seen the glint of her pistol barrel and had fled. He would not return. But she shuddered and drew the sleeping baby close as she thought of356what might have happened had she left him alone in the nest between the rock and the tree.
The precious, helpless child! He was of her own blood, the son of her strong, splendid brother ... of her brother, lying down there in those awful depths, helpless––in agony!...
357CHAPTER XXXICONFESSIONS
A groping hand touched her arm; bandaged fingers sought to feel who she was. Behind her sounded a drowsy incoherent murmur. The snarl of the wolf had roused the sleeper from his torpor.
“Hush––hush!” she whispered. “It is all well. I am here by you. Lie still.”
“Isobel!” he murmured. “Isobel!”
“Yes, dear!” she soothed. “I am here. Rest––go to sleep again. All is well.”
“All is––?” He roused a little more. “You say––Then he is safe! They have brought him up––out of that hell!”
She could not lie outright. “He will soon be safe. By morning help will have come to us. As soon as the men can see to go down, they will descend for him. They will bring him up the way that you have shown us!”
Her voice quivered with pride of what he had done. She drew up his hand and pressed her lips tenderly upon the bandages.
Had the caress been a burn, he could not have more358quickly snatched the hand away. He sought to rise, and struck his head against the overhanging rock.
“Where am I? Let me out!” he said.
“No, you must not! Lie still! You must not!” she remonstrated.
“Lie still?” he repeated. “Lie still! with him down there––alone!”
“But it is night––midnight. It will be hours before even the moon rises.”
“And he down there––alone! Help me make ready. I am going down to him.”
“Going down? But you cannot! It is midnight!”
“There is a lantern. I shall take that. It will be easier than in the daytime, for I shall not see those sickening precipices below.”
He sought to creep out past her. She clutched his arm.
“No, no! do not go! There is no need! Wait until they come. You have done your share––far more than your share! Wait!”
“I cannot,” he replied. “I must go down to him. I have no right to be up here, and he still down there.”
“You must!” she urged, clinging tighter to his arm. “You may fall. I am afraid! I cannot bear it! Do not go! Stay with me––say that you will stay with me––dearest!”
“Good God!” he cried, tearing himself away from her, “To let you say it––say it to me!”359
“Dearest!” she repeated. “Dearest, do not go! There is no need! I cannot bear it! Do not go!”
“No need? My God! When I could fling myself over, if it were not for him! To have let you say it––to me––to a liar! thief! murderer!”
“Dearest!” she whispered. “Hush! You are delirious––you do not know––”
“It is you who do not know!” he cried. “But you shall––everything––all my cowardly baseness!” The confession burst from him in a torrent of self-denunciation––“That trip to town, when we went to fetch them, I lied to you about those bridge plans. It was not true that I found them. He handed them to me. He took no receipt. I looked at them and saw how wonderful they were. I stole them. My father had threatened to cast me off if I did not do something worth while. I was desperate. So I stole your brother’s plans. I copied them––”
“You know about Tom!” she interrupted. “But of course. You saw me tell him, there at the ravine.”
“I saw you put your arms about his neck and kiss him; but I did not hear––I did not see the truth. I believed––that is the worst of it all––I believed it possible that you––you––!... That devil Gowan.... But that is no excuse. Had I not already doubted you.... And I went down––down into hell, with only one purpose––to make certain that he never should come up again!”360
“Dear Christ!” whispered the girl––“Dear Christ! He has gone mad!”
“No, Isobel,” he said, his voice slow and dead with the calm of utter despair, “I am not mad. I have never been mad except for a little while after you put your arms about his neck. No––For years I was a fool, a profligate fool, wasting my life as I wasted all those thousands of dollars that I had not earned. I turned thief––a despicable sneak thief. At last the dirty crime found me out. I received a small share of the punishment that I deserved. Then you took me in––without question––treated me as a man. God knows I tried to be one!”
“You were!––you are!” she broke in. “This is all a mistake––a cruel, hideous mistake!”
“I tried to go,” he went on unflinchingly. “You urged me to stay. I was weak. I could not force myself to leave you.”
“Because––because!” she murmured.
“All the more reason why I should have gone,” he replied. “But I was weak, unfit. I lied to you and won your pity. You gave me the chance to stay and prove myself what I am. Down there, when he told me what I should have guessed––what I must have guessed had not my own baseness blinded me to the truth––when he told me he was your brother, I saw myself, my real self,––my shriveled, black, hellish soul. Now you see why I must go down again. I can361never make reparation for what I have done. But I can at least go down to him.”
“You take all the blame on yourself!” she protested. “What if I had confessed my secret, there at the first, when Tom sprang down from the car and I knew him.”
“If you had told, then I should not have been tempted to doubt you, and I should have gone on, it might have been forever, with that lie and that theft between us––and I should not have been forced to see, as I now see, my absolute unworthiness of you.”
“Of me!” she cried shrilly, and she burst into wild hysterical laughter. It broke off as abruptly as it began. “Unworthy of me––of me? the daughter of a drunken mother, the sister of a girl who––” A sob choked her. She went on desperately: “You have told me all. But I––do you not wonder why I kept silent––why I denied Mary by my silence? You say you sought to harm Tom––down there. You did not know he was my brother. You thought he would harm me. Is it not so?”
“I doubted you!”
“Why? Because I failed to tell the truth. I feared to hurt him––to make trouble between him and his rich, high-bred wife. As if I should not have known better the moment I saw Genevieve! Dear sister! she knows all. But you––Either I should have spoken, or I should have hidden all my fondness for362him. But I could not hide my love for him––and I was ashamed to tell.”
“Ashamed––you?”
“We lived in the slums. They told me my father was a big man, a man such as Tom is now. He was a railroad engineer. He was killed when I was a baby. Then we sank into the slums. My mother––she died when I was twelve. There was then only Mary and I and Tom. He could make only a little, working at odd jobs. Mary and I worked in a factory. Even she was under age. When I was going on fourteen there came a terrible winter when thousands were out of work. We almost starved.”
“You––starved!” murmured Ashton. “Starved! And I was starting in at college, flinging away money!”
“Tom tried to force people to let him work,” the girl went on drearily. “He was violent. They put him in jail. Soon Mary and I had nothing left. There was no work for us. We had sold everything that anyone would buy. The rent was overdue. They turned us out––on the streets.... I was too young; but Mary.... She found a place where I could stay. They were decent people, but hard....
“The weather was bitterly cold. She was taken sick. When the people with whom I was staying heard what she had done, they refused to help. I begged in the street. I was very small and thin. The––the beasts did not trouble me. Then, when Mary363was very sick, I met Daddy. I begged from him. He did not give me a nickel and pass on. He stopped and made me talk––he made me take him to Mary.
“He had her moved to the best hospital.... It was too late.... I also had pneumonia. They said I would die. But Daddy brought me home just as soon as I could be moved. The railroad was then a hundred miles from Dry Mesa. But he kept me wrapped in furs, and all the way he carried me in his arms. Do you wonder why I love him so?... That is all. You see now why I shrank from telling––why I denied Mary.”
“She is in Heaven,” said Ashton––“in Heaven, where some day you will go. But I––I––” She could see no more than the vague blotch of his white face in the darkness, but his voice told her the anguish of his look. “He was right––your brother. He told me that we always take with us the heaven or the hell that we each have made for ourselves.... I have lost you.... You know now why I am going down to do the little that I can do.”
“You are going down?” she asked wonderingly. “You still say that you are going down? Yet I have told you about––Mary!”
“If you were she, I still would be utterly unfit to look you in the face. I shall go to the camp for the lantern. There were other gloves and some of my clothing.”364
“They are all here.”
“Show me where they are, and get ready the lantern and bandages and a sack of food.”
“You are going down,” she acquiesced. “You are going to Tom. And you are coming up with him––to me!”
“That is too much. I doubted you. Where are those things? He is waiting down there alone.”
“Here is his child, my nephew,” she said. “Hold him while I go for what you need. Here is my pistol. The man who shot you, who twice tried to murder you––he is somewhere up here. He will not harm me. But you––If he comes creeping in on you here, shoot him as you would shoot a coyote.”
“The man who shot me? He is up here?”
“You have seen him every day since that first day I met you,” replied the girl. “His name is Gowan.”
“Gowan?”
“Kid Gowan, murderer! I saw his eyes as he looked at you, lying down there on the brink. Then I knew.”
“But––if he––Where is Genevieve? I cannot go and leave you alone.”
“You can––you must! He is a coward. He dare not follow you down that terrible place. No harm will come to me if you are gone. But if he comes back and finds you––do you not see that if he kills you, he must also kill me? But in the morning, when the365others come––Oh, why hasn’t Daddy come? All this long time since you went down into the depths, and he not with us! If only he were here!”
“Genevieve?” again inquired Ashton.
“She has gone. She started down the mountain for help when Kid went away. I’m so afraid for you, dear! He may be creeping back now––he may be waiting already, close by here, in the darkness. But if he has not heard our voices, he will go first to where you came up, and then to the tent. Keep quiet until I return. Wait; here is cream and egg. Drink it all.”
When he had drained the bowl that she held to his lips, she crept away. Ashton sat still, the warm, soft little body of the sleeping baby in his arms, the pistol in his bandaged right hand. In her excitement Isobel had forgotten his bound fingers. If Gowan had come on him then, he would have put the baby back in under the rock, and faced the puncher’s revolver with a smile. What had he now to live for? He had lost her. She had not yet grasped the baseness of what he had thought and done. As soon as she realized ... And he could never forgive himself.