“The mules, sir—go back and find the stream? What about the Indians, if they are coming on?” The colonel had forgotten their pursuers. “The mules,” he said then; and he led the way on into the mist, Cyril following him wonderingly along the continuation of the rocky shelf for about a hundred yards, and glancing back from time to time to see that John Manning was close behind, untying the knots of the hide ropes as he came.
Every step took them nearer to the great waterfall, and in the dim light Cyril now made out that the path was wider; but all at once it seemed to end in front of a gleaming sheet of water reaching from the thick mist below right up to where the rock-walls appeared to give place to the spray-clouded sky. And there, just before them, all huddled together, stood the mules, ready to turn toward them as they approached.
“They brought me as far as this last night,” said the colonel, “and then stopped. No wonder, poor brutes, they would go no farther; and I was lost in the darkness, and dared not turn back. I stood with them till daybreak, hoping you all were safe, and then—”
Cyril uttered a wild cry of joy, one which made itself heard by all, for a bare-headed misty figure, whose presence they had not been aware of as it followed them, suddenly caught the colonel’s arm, placed its lips to his ear, and cried:
“Quick, father—the Indians; they’re coming down the valley fast.”
In the face of such news as Perry bore, there was no time to ask questions about his escape, but as the colonel grasped the boy’s arm, trembling the while with excitement, his heart throbbing with joy, he cried:
“How far away?”
“Not half a mile. I could see them coming down the valley.”
“This way,” said the colonel promptly, and he supplemented his words with gestures, as, still holding his son’s arm tightly, he led them on through the mist of fine spray inward toward where the mules were standing together. And now as they approached the fall, a great deal of the horror caused by the darkness and noise passed away, for the mist grew opalescent from the sunshine far above, and though progress looked terribly perilous, they could see the extent of their danger, and there was no mystery of hidden peril, no constant dread of unknown chasms waiting to engulf them at their next stride.
For they knew now that they were in one of Nature’s wildest and grandest rifts, where a goodly-sized river, after tearing its way along the profound depths of a narrow gorge, had reached a spot where by some earthquake convulsion this gorge had suddenly, as it were, broken in two. One part had dropped several hundred feet, forming a profound chasm into which the water from above leaped in one great glistening wave, smooth as so much gleaming glass, to be broken up into spray as it reached the jagged rocks below, and there eddy and foam in what was undoubtedly a huge basin, from which the mist arose, while the broken water swept on down into the valley to join the little stream by whose side they had come.