“I came up against a rock like a dead fish,” said he, “my head above water, luckily. The current pinned me there and held me from slipping down. That saved me, for I hadn’t strength to catch hold. The pressure almost finished me, but a few gasps cleared my lungs of water, and that helped some. 198
“There is no need for me to pretend that I know how I got on that rock, for I don’t know. A man loses the conscious relation with life in such a poignant crisis. He does heroic things, and overcomes tremendous odds, fighting to save what the Almighty has lent him for a little while. But I got on that rock. I lay there with just as little life in me as could kindle and warm under the ashes again. I might have perished of the chill of that place if it hadn’t been that the rock was a big one, big enough for me to tramp up and down a few feet and warm myself when I was able.
“I don’t know how far along the cañon I was, or how long it was after day broke over the world outside before the gray light sifted down to me. It revealed to me the fact that my rock of refuge was about midway of the stream, which was peculiarly free of obstructions just there. It seemed to me that the hand of Providence must have dashed me against it, and from that gleam I gathered the conviction that it was not ordained for me to perish there. I could not see daylight out of either end of the cañon, for its walls are winding, and of course I had nothing but a guess as to how far I had come.
“There was no foothold in the cliffs on either hand that I could see, and the pounding of that heavy volume of water down the fall of the cañon seemed to make the cliffs tremble. I had to get ashore against the cliff-side, somehow, if I ever intended to get out, and I intended to get out, no two ways about it. I might drown 199 if I plunged in, but I might not. And I was certain to starve if I stuck to the rock. So I took off my coat, which the river had spared me, and let myself down from the lower end of the rock. I had that rolling and thrashing experience all over again, still not quite so bad, for there was daylight to cheer me every time my head got clear of the water.
“There’s no use pulling the story out. I made it. I landed, and I found that I could work my way along the side of the cliff and over the fallen masses by the waterside. It wasn’t so bad after that.
“My hope was that I might find a place where a breach in the cliff would offer me escape that way, but there was none. The strip of sky that I could see looked no wider than my hand. I saw the light at the mouth of the cañon when it was beginning to fall dusk in there. I suppose it was along the middle of the afternoon.”
“We were over there about then,” said she, “thinking you might have gone in to try for that reward. If we only had known!”
“You could have come over to the other end with a blanket,” said he, touching her hand in a little communicative expression of thankfulness for her interest. “There is a little gravelly strand bordering the river at that end. After its wild plunge it comes out quite docile, and not half so noisy as it goes in. I reached that strip of easy going just as it was growing too dark for safe groping over the rocks, and when I got there my legs bent like hot candles. 200
“I crawled the rest of the way; when I got out I must have been a sight to see. I know that I almost frightened out of his remaining wits a sheep-herder who was watering his flock. He didn’t believe that I came through the cañon; he didn’t believe anything I said, not even when I told him that I was cold and hungry.”
“The unfeeling beast!”