Below the falls the overflow had formed a backwater through the meadow, and that Saturday morning Alice took the Jerseys from the higher ground of the home enclosure, and put them to graze on the slope. She intended to ride directly on to the Station for the mail, and made a short cut through the park to strike the trail beyond the first knoll. It was then, while the black paced slowly among the wet trees, that the sound of the landslide clashed through the hills. Colonel stopped, trembling; hoofs planted, head up, nostrils wide and quivering, then, panic driven, broke. A little later, when she had drawn him down, and still quieting him, turned again towards the trail, Stratton's horse, arrested by the washed out bridge on his way to the lodge, thundered back in the direction of the Nisqually.
There was a flash of the chestnut coat between the branches; a glimpse of the empty saddle and he was gone. But instantly Alice saw that Stratton had returned. He had, of course, taken the branch through the canyon and the thoroughbred had refused the swollen ford; he had bolted, skirting the submerged jungle to the main trail, and left his master unhorsed, perhaps hurt, at the crossing.
She turned and rode back towards the gorge, expecting to pick up the trail at the foot of the bluff, where it wound down from the tower. "It's all right, Colonel," she said, "it's all right. You ought to know a slide by this time. But I don't blame you; it was a monster; it sounded like the whole canyon wall coming down."
Dropping from the open park to the underbrush of the gorge, she turned the horse into a thinned way, evidently once blazed by some passing woodsman. Then, presently, looking up between boughs, she saw a low cloud, trailing over and blotting out the summit where the tower had stood, and below it the demolished front of the cliff. At the same moment, Colonel, pushing through a tangle of salal, stumbled to his knees. She glanced back to see what had caused the fall and her eyes rested on a weather-beaten stake, such as a surveyor or prospector uses in marking off land, driven close to alow, outcropping ledge. A few steps farther on she noticed a blaze in the bark of a hemlock, in which had been cut a small arrow, pointing downward at this rock.
The horse moved on and she lifted her eyes again to the cliff. Midway the slide had shaved off a jutting spur, and, suddenly, a shaft of sunlight filtering through the clouds, struck from this new surface a blaze of colors. Instantly she thought of the samples of ore Paul Forrest had once shown her. Here were the same blues and purples, the shine of silver, the glint of dull yellow. It was, she knew it was, the lost prospect. It was Paul who had driven that stake. It was here in this canyon, while he groped a way out of the hills, he had stumbled on his find. The mist, hanging over as it did today, had obscured the tower and given the gorge a different aspect than later, in clear weather, it had shown. But this was the place and the slide had uncovered the mother lode.
She sat for a moment, holding in her horse and looking up at that dazzling ledge. She drew full breaths with parted lips; the bloom of a wild rose was in her cheeks; a soft brightness shone in her eyes. Then she was reminded of her present duty by a voice; a man's voice calling faintly, "Help, oh—help."
A little below the broken spur the cliff began to dip outward, forming an incline to the bottom of the gorge. Trees had found hold on this pitch, and where the top created a narrow bench, the uprooted trunk of a giant fir, flanked by the stub of an old cedar, timbered a barricade of splintered rock and earth. The last soft downrush had nearly filled this rampart, and streamed out through the dip between the felled boles, covering slabs and boulders, evening the slide to the appearance of a newly graded roadway. It was there, directly under the mineral ledge, that Alice located the voice. She concluded it was Stratton's; that he had not been thrown at the ford, but on the cliff; and he had been caught in the avalanche.
She answered the call, but it was not repeated, and she quickly chose a way to reach the shelf. She saw that the trail from the ford up the bluff was lost in shifting granite; and, for a long distance, passage up the fir was obstructed by a network of boughs; but the fallen cedar, slowly dying, had lost many of its branches; those remaining were still pliable. She left her horse, and, pushing through a litter of snapped saplings and broken limbs, reached this tree.
Its top was splintered and set like a brace against the trunk of a standing hemlock. Ragged boughs at first retarded her; she was forced to work on her knees, through their meshes. Sometimes she swung herself down to trudge ankle-deep, knee-deep through the soft fill around a barrier. She crawled over suspended boulders, under tilting slabs that had found lodgment on the great bole. In one of these places, where a mighty fragment of rock had struck, the bark was stripped loose in lengths. Later she remembered this.
At last she gained the end of the tree, and sinking in an accumulation of earth, found the support of a root and drew herself up, slowly, bringing her eyes to the top of the barricade. The color went from her face; her shoulders shook; her limbs; but she pulled herself higher and leaned on the rim. This man was not Stratton. His body was buried; only his head and one shoulder were uncovered; the face was turned from her. But this man was not Stratton.