He started as violently as if a gun had gone off. Only the vicious snapping of a dry twig under foot; but, Lord, the racket! His caution redoubled.
With horror he remembered that old pastime—rolling the rocks down. How they bounded and crashed! Across the years he heard again the reverberant thunder of that long falling. What if he should displace one of these.... He drew his foot back, trembling from head to heel at the slight rocking of a boulder. Could he venture down in this darkness?
Wasn't, after all, the darkness an indispensable part of his plan? He stood and listened. Behind the sound of falling water there was nothing, not even a bird's note. The stillness was piercing. Under its penetrant impact he shrank inwardly.
What was that?
Something had sprung out of the shadow. Lord! Nothing but an infernal rabbit; and the damned fool had dislodged a few little stones.
Napier sat crouching in the gorge a good four or five minutes after the last of that pop-popping died. He had pulled off his cap and thrust it into his pocket. He wiped his forehead. Whew! nothing but a damned rabbit!
He listened an instant, and then went on down in the murk and the fine rain. Suddenly he stood still again. There wasn't a sound his ear could verify. But he held his breath, while horror moved like a wind in his hair.
He wasn't alone.
How he knew, he couldn't have told. He plunged his hand into his revolver pocket, braced himself, and waited. Waited while the seconds passed. Waited till that first strong impression weakened, till he had silently called himself a few unpleasant names, and had drawn out of his pocket the cap he told himself his addled pate needed more than the protection of firearms. He went on in the act of settling the cap firmly on his head. He had heard nothing, seen nothing, when a blow on the back all but felled him. He saved himself from falling flat only by plunging a few paces down the gorge. He managed to recover, and wheeled about, his hand at his pocket. Before he could get at his pistol, that hand and the other arm were seized in a powerful grip. His hobnailed boot did him the instant service of bringing his assailant down on one knee. But Napier was dragged along with him in those arms of iron. It flashed over Napier that the aim of this dumb enemy was not so much to kill as to disarm him.
It was a battle for a pistol. The conviction grew in Napier's mind that he would already be lying dead there among the rocks but for the man's strange caution. He didn't want that pistol to go off; and so they wrestled in a nightmare of blind silence. Now one, and now the other, regained his footing and then lost it; and now they both went rolling down together till the rocks stopped them. And still no word was spoken.