“I wish to heaven I had,” answered Ormond, with cold deliberateness. “As it is, you have helped that man to rob me again, even at the last, and I would give all I have to change places now with him.”
Then, while Lawrence wondered what he meant, though when I heard the story I fully understood, the head of my horse rose for an instant out of the tumbling waters, sank, and rising, went down again, while a tremor ran through the Colonel’s rigid frame, and he leaned against a hemlock with great beads of sweat on his forehead. The poor beast had doubtless been mangled against a boulder, and the sight was horribly suggestive.
“A very grim man,” said Lawrence, when he narrated what happened; “but I felt most cruelly sorry for him. Didn’t say very much—his sort never do; but he was in mortal anguish, and I knew how he would miss the girl.”
Colonel Carrington was, nevertheless, the first to master his feelings, and his voice was steady once more when he turned to Ormond.
“Geoffrey, you will go back and send my sister round with the Indian by Tomlinson’s crossing. Then you will return and overtake us in the ravine yonder. We are going to follow the crest of the cañon to—to—see what we can find.”
It was a stiff climb up the ravine, trying in places to a mountaineer, but the old man held close behind his companion, and Lawrence wondered at him. He also felt 187 sorry for Ormond, whose task it was to overtake them, but when at last they hurried breathless through the pinewoods toward the edge of the chasm above the fall, the latter, looking like a ghost, came panting up with them. Then, standing on the dizzy brink, Colonel Carrington gazed down at the spout of green water and the whirling spray, which were dwarfed by the distance.
“That is the greatest danger, that and the whirlpool. Anything would swing round in the eddy, would it not?” he said. “Now, I want only the truth—you understand these rivers—could any white man take a canoe down there and through the pool safely?” and Lawrence, who dare not prevaricate with that gaze upon him, answered reluctantly, “I do not think so.”
The Colonel’s thin face twitched. “I thank you. No other possible landing place or foothold, is there? And it would take a day to go back to Tomlinson’s and portage a canoe. Well, we’ll go on to the end in a last hope that they have got through.”
Now climbing is difficult in that region, because where the mountain slopes do not consist of almost precipitous snow-ground rock, they are clothed with forest and dense undergrowth, and it was therefore some time before the three had traversed the league or so that divided the summit from the outlet valley. Neither when they got there did they find the canoe, because when I helped Grace ashore I did not care where it went, and, once on terra firma she fainted suddenly, and then lay for a time sobbing on my shoulder in a state of nervous collapse. As she said, though a brave one, she was after all only a woman, and what had happened would have tested the endurance of many a man. At last, however, I managed to help her up a ravine leading down to the river, after which she leaned heavily on my arm as we plodded through the forest until we reached a 188 small rancher’s shanty, where, as the owner was absent, I took the liberty of lighting his stove and preparing hot tea. Then I left Grace to dry her garments.
We must have spent several hours at the ranch, for Grace was badly shaken, and I felt that rest was needful for both of us, while, when I returned to the cabin after drying myself in the sun, she lay back in a hide-chair sleeping peacefully. So while the shadows of the firs lengthened across the clearing I sat very still, until with a light touch I ventured to rouse her. She woke with a gasp of horror, looked around with frightened eyes, then clung to me, and I knelt beside the chair with my arms about her, until at last with a happy little laugh she said: