I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked down, with bewilderment and a little fear constricting my heart.
He stood very still, staring up the line, and a thickness came in my throat, so that I could not for the moment call to him as I wanted to. For there was an ominous suggestion in his posture that sent a wave of sickness through me—a suggestion of rigid expectation, like that one might fancy a victim of the old reign of terror would have shown as he waited his turn on the guillotine.
And as I paused in indecision—at that moment came a surging rumble and a puff of steam from a dip in the hills a hundred yards away, and the figure threw itself down, with its neck stretched over the shining vein of iron that ran in front of it. And I cried “Jason!” in a nightmare voice, and had hardly strength to turn my head away from the sight that I knew was coming. Yet through all my sick panic the shadow of a thought flashed—blame me for it who will—“Let me bear it and not give way, for he is taking the sure way to end his terror.”
The thunder of the monster death came with the thought—shook the air of the hills—broke into a piercing scream of triumph as it rushed down on its victim—passed and clanged away among the hollows, as if the crushed mass in its jaws were choking it to silence. Then I brushed the blind horror from my eyes and looked down.
He was lying on the chalk of the embankment below me; he was stirring; he sat up and looked about him with a bewildered stare. The tragedy had ended in bathos after all. At the last moment courage had failed the poor wretch and he had leaped from the hurtling doom.
Shaking all over, I scrambled, slipping and rolling, down the slope, and landed on my feet before him.
“Up!” I cried; “up! Don’t wait to speak or explain! They’ll telegraph from the next stopping-place, and you’ll be laid by the heels for attempted suicide.”
He rose staggering and half-fell against me.
“Renny,” he whimpered in a thick voice and clutched at my shoulders to steady himself. “My God! I nearly did it—didn’t I?”
“Come away, I tell you. It’ll be too late in another half-hour.”