Kitabı oku: «Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation», sayfa 16

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.

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. Genevieve 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.

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 four years 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 glasses showed 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 burning its 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 to sleep, 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 powers of 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: “Leg broken–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.

CHAPTER XXX
LURKING 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.”

“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.”

“But he came 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!”

“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. “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 and gazing 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 he should lose 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 between a 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.

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 of what 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!..