The old man danced in frenzy:
“Job in your heels and run like hell!”
But the mass had started, and was moving faster. Sprudell’s feet went from under him, and he collapsed in a limp heap. Then he turned over and scrabbled madly with hands and feet for something that would hold. Everything loosened at his touch and joined the sliding bank of shale. He could as easily have stopped his progress down a steep slate roof.
“Oh, Lord! There goes my dude!” Uncle Bill wrung his hands and swore.
Sprudell felt faint, nauseated, and his neck seemed unable to hold his heavy head. He laid his cheek on the cold shale, and, with his arms and legs outstretched like a giant starfish, he weakly slid. His body, moving slower than the mass, acted as a kind of wedge, his head serving as a separator to divide the moving bank. He was conscious, too, of a curious sensation in his spine—a feeling as though some invisible power were pulling backward, backward until it hurt. He wanted to scream, to hear his own voice once more, but his vocal cords would not respond; he could not make a sound.
Griswold was shouting something; it did not matter what. He heard it faintly above the clatter of the rocks. He must be close to the edge now—Bartlesville—the Commercial Club—Abe Cone—and then Mr. Sprudell hit something with a bump! He had a sensation as of a hatpin—many hatpins—penetrating his tender flesh, but that was nothing compared to the fact that he had stopped, while the slide of shale was rushing by. He was not dead! but he was too astonished and relieved to immediately wonder why.
Then he weakly raised his head and looked cautiously over his shoulder lest the slightest movement start him travelling again. What miracle had saved his life? The answer was before him. When he came down the slide in the fortunate attitude of a clothespin, the Fates, who had other plans for him, it seemed, steered him for a small tree of the stout mountain mahogany, which has a way of pushing up in most surprising places.
“Don’t move!” called Griswold. “I’ll come and get ye!”
Unnecessary admonition. Although Sprudell was impaled on the thick, sharp thorns like a naturalist’s captive butterfly, he scarcely breathed, much less attempted to get up.
“Bill, I was near the gates,” said Sprudell solemnly when Griswold, at no small risk to himself, had snaked him back to solid ground. “Fortuna audaces juvat!”