"Me go," he insisted. "Cable jump sheave? What matter? One damn dago gone. Plenty more. No more Élise."
Élise pulled at him violently. He was ill-balanced. The pull brought him to the floor, but Élise did not loose her hold. Her eyes were flashing.
"Do as I told you."
The man brought a ladder and Élise sprang lightly up the rounds.
"All right," she said. "Go ahead."
The man unloosed the brake. There was a tremor along the cable; the next instant the bucket shot from the door of the tower and glided swiftly up the line.
"Don't forget. Three-twenty." Already the voice was faint with distance.
In spite of injunctions to the contrary, Miss Hartwell was looking out of the window. She saw, below the shafts of sunlight already streaming over the mountain, the line of buckets stop, swing back and forth, saw the cable tremble, and again the long line of buckets sway gently as the cable grew taut and the buckets again slid up and down. Her heart was beating wildly as she lifted her eyes to the dizzy height. She knew well what the stopping and the starting meant. Sharp drawn against the lofty sky, the great cable seemed a slender thread to hold a human life in trust. What if the clutch should slip that held the bucket in place? What if other clutches should slip and let the heavy masses of steel slide down the cable to dash into the one that held the girl who had grown so dear to her? In vain she pushed these possibilities aside. They returned with increased momentum and hurled themselves into her shrinking soul. There were these dangers. "All employees of the Rainbow Company are forbidden to ride on the tram. Any Employee Violating This Rule Will Be Instantly Discharged." These words burned themselves on her vision in characters of fire. Élise had explained all of these things to her, and now! She buried her face in her trembling hands. Not for long. Again her face, pale and drawn, was turned upward. She moaned aloud. A black mass clinging to the cable was rising and sinking, swaying from side to side, a slender figure poised in the swinging bucket, steadied by a white hand that grasped the rim of steel. She turned from the window resolved to see no more. Her resolution fled. She was again at the window with upturned face and straining eyes, white lips whispering prayers that God might be good to the girl who was risking her life for another. The slender threads even then had vanished. There was only a fleck of black floating high above the rambling town, above the rocks mercilessly waiting below. She did not see all. At the mine two stealthy men were even then stuffing masses of powder under the foundations that held the cables to their work. Even as she looked and prayed a flickering candle flame licked into fiery life a hissing, spitting fuse and two men scrambled and clambered to safety from the awful wreck that was to come. A smoking fuse eating its way to death and "320" not yet in the mill! She saw another sight.
From out the shadow of the eastern mountain, a band of uncouth men emerged, swung into line and bunched on the level terrace beyond the boarding-house. Simultaneously every neighbouring boulder blossomed forth in tufts of creamy white that writhed and widened till they melted in thin air like noisome, dark-grown fungi that wilt in the light of day. Beyond and at the feet of the clustered men spiteful spurts of dust leaped high in air, then drifted and sank, to be replaced by others. Faint, meaningless cries wove through the drifting crash of rifles, blossoming tufts sprang up again and again from boulders near and far. Answering cries flew back from the opening cluster of men, other tufts tongued with yellow flame sprang out from their levelled guns. Now and then a man spun around and dropped, a huddled grey on the spurting sand.
It was not in man long to endure the sheltered fire. Dragging their wounded, Jack Haskins's gang again converged, and headed in wild retreat for the office. The opposing tufts came nearer, and now and then a dark form straightened and advanced to another shelter, or was hidden from sight by a bubble of fleecy white that burst from his shoulder. Close at the heels of the fleeing men the spiteful spurts followed fast, till they died out in the thud of smitten logs and the crashing glass of the office.