But the river had risen behind them, and a foaming floor of water stretched from side to side of the chasm.
Clinging like conies to those bare declivities they were shot screaming for mercy or insane with fear, and fell like blood-gutted leeches into the flood beneath.
Terrington watched the slaughter, silent and stern, feeling to be but the avenging instrument of God, yet wishing for the qualities of a god to reconcile him to its pitilessness and inevitable injustice.
While he watched, his ear caught the click of little feet on the rocks, and he turned to find Rose Chantry beside him, gazing down upon the torment of that gulf of death.
"Go back!" he said hurriedly. "You mustn't see this."
She turned to him a little face fierce and white and ablaze with vengeance.
"I shall see it," she cried imperiously; "they killed my husband."
Yet her vengeance came rather from the relief of long pent anxiety, and it was less of her husband that she was thinking than of the man who had come back to her out of mortal danger, his coat ripped by bullets in two places and a dark scum of dried blood across his face from a flesh-wound in the temple.