“Oh, but it’s November!” Nan reminded him apprehensively. “It’s winter; that’s what makes it so cold. You never can tell in November.”
“It won’t last all night, anyway,” he answered with confidence.
Despite his assurance, however, it did last all 351 night, and it was only the lulls between the sharp squalls that enabled them to cover the trail before daylight. When they paused before El Capitan the fury of the night seemed largely to have exhausted itself, but the overcharged air hung above the mountains, trembling and moaning like a bruised and stricken thing. Lightning, playing across the inky heavens, blazed in constant sheets from end to end of the horizon. Its quivering glare turned the wild night into a kind of ghastly, uncertain day. Thunder, hoarse with invective, and hurled mercilessly back and forth by the fitful wind, drew farther and farther into the recess of the mountains, only to launch its anger against its own imprisoned echoes. Under it all the two refugees, high on the mountainside, looked down on the flooding Gap.
Their flight was almost ended. Only the sheer cliff ahead blocked their descent to the aspen grove. De Spain himself had already crossed El Capitan once, and he had done it at night––but it was not, he was compelled to remind himself, on a night like this. It seemed now a madman’s venture and, without letting himself appear to do so, he watched Nan’s face as the lightning played over it, to read if he could, unsuspected, whether she still had courage for the undertaking. She regarded him so collectedly, whether answering 352 a question or asking one, that he marvelled at her strength and purpose. Hardly a moment passed after they had started until the eastern sky lightened before the retreating storm, and with the first glimmer of daylight, the two were at the beginning of the narrow foothold which lay for half a mile between them and safety.
Here the El Capitan trail follows the face of the almost vertical wall which, rising two thousand feet in the air, fronts the gateway of Morgan’s Gap.
They started forward, de Spain ahead. There was nothing now to hurry them unduly, and everything to invite caution. The footholds were slippery, rivulets still crossed the uncertain path, and fragments of rock that had washed down on the trail, made almost every step a new hazard. The face of El Capitan presents, midway, a sharp convex. Just where it is thrown forward in this keen angle, the trail runs out almost to a knife-edge, and the mountain is so nearly vertical that it appears to overhang the floor of the valley.
They made half the stretch of this angle with hardly a misstep, but the advance for a part of the way was a climb, and de Spain, turning once to speak to Nan, asked her for her rifle, that he might carry it with his own. What their story might have been had she given it to him, none 353 can tell. But Nan, holding back, refused to let him relieve her. The dreaded angle which had haunted de Spain all night was safely turned on hands and knees and, as they rounded it toward the east, clouds scudding over the open desert broke and shot the light of dawn against the beetling arête.
De Spain turned in some relief to point to the coming day. As he did so a gust of wind, sweeping against the sheer wall, caught him off his guard. He regained his balance, but a stone, slipping underfoot, tipped him sidewise, and he threw himself on his knees to avoid the dizzy edge. As he fell forward he threw up his hand to save his hat, and in doing so released his rifle, which lay under his hand on the rock. Before he could recover it the rifle slipped from reach. In the next instant he heard it bouncing from rock to rock, five hundred feet below.
Greatly annoyed and humiliated, he regained his feet and spoke with a laugh to reassure Nan. Just as she answered not to worry, a little singing scream struck their ears; something splashed suddenly close at hand against the rock wall; chips scattered between them. From below, the sound of a rifle report cracked against the face of the cliff. They were so startled, so completely amazed that they stood motionless. De Spain looked 354 down and over the uneven floor of the Gap. The ranch-houses, spread like toys in the long perspective, lay peacefully revealed in the gray of the morning. Among the dark pine-trees he could discern Nan’s own home. Striving with the utmost keenness of vision to detect where the shot had come from, de Spain could discover no sign of life around any of the houses. But in another moment the little singing scream came again, the blow of the heavy slug against the splintering rock was repeated, the distant report of the rifle followed.
“Under fire,” muttered de Spain. He looked questioningly at Nan. She herself, gazing across the dizzy depths, was searching for the danger-point. A third shot followed at a seemingly regular interval––the deliberate interval needed by a painstaking marksman working out his range and taking his time to find it. De Spain watched Nan’s search anxiously. “We’d better keep moving,” he said. “Come! whoever is shooting can follow us a hundred yards either way.” In front of de Spain a fourth bullet struck the rock. “Nan,” he muttered, “I’ve got you into a fix. If we can’t stop that fellow he is liable to stop us. Can you see anything?” he asked, waiting for her to come up.