But the going was difficult, and Merriwell realized, with a sinking heart, that it would be impossible for him to reach the ledge before the charge of dynamite had exploded. Then, at the very moment the realization came home to him, he saw Darrel pawing and scrambling over the rocks toward his uncle.
A hopeful thought plunged through Merriwell’s brain. A light dawned upon him suddenly. Here was the very chance for which Ellis Darrel had been waiting. Fate had taken his affairs in hand, and, in a short two minutes of time, was revealing to the colonel the varying dispositions of his two nephews.
The one who, up to that moment, had had all Hawtrey’s affection and confidence, was bounding and plunging down the slope and abandoning him to his fate. The other, the lad that had been cast adrift and had been looked upon as a ne’er-do-well and a forger, was struggling valiantly to reach his uncle’s side and extinguish the blazing fuse.
There was danger in Darrel’s attempt. He was handicapped in his work because of his useless arm, and he had not a second to spare if he gained the ledge in time. If he failed to reach the ledge before the fuse exploded the cap and the cap set off the dynamite, then not only his uncle but he himself would be killed by the blast.
Darrel must have understood this, yet it made not the slightest difference to him. Furiously he was fighting his way over the rough ground toward the ledge. Again and again he stumbled and fell. His broken arm surely received many an agonizing wrench, but physical pain was as powerless to hold him back as was the prospect of death from his failure to reach the sputtering fuse in time.
Colonel Hawtrey at last became aware that some one else was coming to his rescue. He turned and, with glimmering eyes, watched the fierce efforts of Darrel. The boy’s face was white and haggard, but the same resolution smoldered in his eyes that had fixed itself there when he had left Dolliver’s.
The colonel was calm, now. The old military spirit revived in him, and he turned calculating eyes upon the fuse and measured at a glance the space that separated Darrel from the ledge.
“Stop where you are, El!” the colonel called, commandingly. “You can’t get here in time. If you keep on, two lives instead of one will be lost. Turn back, I tell you!”
Darrel did not answer. Neither did he turn back. He held to his course. There was a smear of red on the bandage that swathed the arm, but he continued to fight his way onward.
As a mere exhibition of pluck, the boy’s work was splendid. But what he was doing reached deeper, and something like admiration filled the colonel’s face as he watched. He tried no longer to make Darrel turn back. Possibly he knew any command of his would be useless.