“Through that hole?” gasped Ashton. “No! I’ve done enough. I shall stay here.”
“To drown like a rat in a rainwater barrel!” rejoined Blake. “Look at that watermark. The tunnel is now running full. Inside a quarter-hour the river will be up over this ledge. It will keep rising till it reaches that mark, and it will not fall until after low water.”
“What do I care?” said Ashton hopelessly. “Go to the devil your own way. I’d rather drown here than in that underground hole. Leave me alone.”
Blake considered a full half minute, looked up the cliff face, and replied: “Perhaps it’s as well. I shall do the best I can. But first I want to tell you I’ve wiped out all that past affair. You are another person from that Lafayette Ashton. We stand here almost face to face with the Unknown. One or both of us may soon go out into the Darkness. As we may never meet again, I wish to tell you that you have proved yourself, even more than I hoped when I saw you come rushing down the ravine to join me. You have proved yourself a man. Good-by.”
He held out his hand. But Ashton turned his face to the wall of rock and was silent. After a time he heard the sound of Blake’s worn heels on the outer end of the shelf. His ears, attuned to the ceaseless tumult of the waters, caught the click of the protruded heel-nail heads. There was a brief pause––then the plunge. He looked about quickly and saw Blake’s hands vanish in the down-sucking eddy where the swollen waters drew into the now hidden intake of the tunnel.
A cry of horror burst from his heaving chest. Blake had gone––Blake the iron-limbed, iron-hearted man. He had conquered the river––and now the wild waters had seized him and were mauling and smashing and crushing him in the terrible mill of the cavern. Beyond that underground passage, it might be miles away, the victor would fling up on some fanged rock a shapeless mass that once had been a man.
* * *
CHAPTER XXVIII
LIGHT 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. His 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
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 the gorged 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 the barrier. “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 down the 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.
“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 mesa and 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. “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!”
“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,” he 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.
“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 gi
ve 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.
* * *
CHAPTER XXIX
THE 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 down through 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.
Out of the Depths Page 23
