I
Josephine Stone and Acey Smith descended the cliff and walked to the upper tunnel at the water-gate of the Cup of Nannabijou with scarcely a word uttered between them. There was a host of things she wanted to say to him and to ask him about, but his present mood entirely precluded it. It made her feel like a child and baffled her so that she was vexed at him and at herself.
In the tunnel he stopped to touch the secret button. As the gong sounded he looked up at it quickly.
“That’s odd,” he remarked, “that sort of prolonged twin-stroke. I never heard the bell ring just that way before.”
When the water in the channel had disappeared he helped her down the steps.
They had progressed about half way, to the point where the channel curved and the lower tunnel should next come into view on the left, when the deep, vibrating alarum of the water-gate gong sang out again.
At his startled gasp she turned and saw racing at them a great wall of foaming, raging water. Josephine Stone screamed out of very terror of it.
“Quick!” he cried as he drew her swiftly with him. “There is one way I may save you.”
She had a fleeting vision of a group of horror-stricken faces at the lower tunnel’s mouth, Hammond’s among them.
The tunnel and the flight of steps running up to it were but a few short paces away, but the raging, death-dealing torrent was foaming at their very heels and the tunnel’s mouth was high above their reach.
Acey Smith stopped one instant. The next he seized her below the knees.
“Stiffen out!” he commanded.
As the tide of water smote them she was conscious of being thrust upward by his powerful arms, of his fingers releasing themselves from her lower limbs and of her form being catapulted unerringly through space to the mouth of the tunnel and into the arms of Louis Hammond.
All went black for the briefest space. With a supreme effort of will she warded off the fainting spell.
She, with the others, was looking with horrified fascination into the channel where the water wall had swept on and ceased to flow. On the wet rock bottom lay Acey Smith, face up, where he had been flung by the torrent that was cut off too late.
His great proud form, which a moment ago had been flexing, powerful muscles, was ominously inert, and from a corner of his mouth trickled a crimson stream.
Willing arms carried him up the stone steps, through the tunnel and out into the open. There they laid him gently upon the sward.
The girl bent over him her hand feeling for his heartbeats as she tenderly wiped the blood-stains from his mouth and cheek, Hammond silently kneeling beside her.
At her touch Acey Smith’s eyes fluttered and there came a wan smile of recognition as he looked from the girl’s face to Hammond’s.
Tremblingly, he groped for a hand of each and brought them together over his breast.
“Tell Sandy Macdougal,” he whispered weakly, “to come up and get my packsack. I could have wished—to have lived—to kiss the bride.”
The heart of Josephine Stone was too full for words. Silently, she stooped and pressed her warm lips to his chilling ones. With scarcely a tremor the light left his face and he was very still.
The spark that had been a man had fled.