"No!"—the pained and weakening voice came back, and then they all knew what had reduced that athletic and iron-gripped man to such a state that he could make no effort to swing himself up again. He spoke brokenly and feebly, but Horace Townsend and some of the others caught the words: "I can't catch the rope—I put my right shoulder out of joint as I fell—I can't hold on much longer—I shall faint with this pain—oh, can't some of you help me?"
Then passed over the countenance of Horace Townsend one of those sweeping expressions which make humanity something more or less than human. It may have been the god stirring—it may have been the demon. No one saw it—not even Margaret Hayley; for when he turned nothing more was to be seen than that the brow was very dark, and that the lips were set grimly. The powers looking downward from heaven on the falling of leaves and the nesting of young birds may have remarked the whole expression and set it down at its true worth, and that will eventually be found quite sufficient. Before he turned he shouted, much louder and more authoritatively than he had spoken before, to the man hanging between life and death below:
"Hold on, like a man! We will do something to help you!"
Then he spoke to the two young men, one of whom yet held the end of the rope:
"Tie a big loop in that rope, quick—ten or a dozen feet from the end."
They proceeded to do so, with not unskilful hands, and in that instant the lawyer approached Captain Hector Coles, where he stood, only a few feet off, still holding the dress of Margaret Hayley. He did not appear to see her at all, but she saw him, and there was that upon his face which frightened her so that she literally gasped.
"Captain Coles!" he said, "do you know what you said of me the other night and again the other day? There is a rope, and there is yet a chance to save that man. Go down, if you are as brave as you boast, and save him. Do you hear me?—go!"
"I? Humph!" That was all the reply that the Captain, half-stupefied, could make to what he believed to be the words of a madman.
"No, I thought not!" sneered the voice through the hard lips. With the words coat and vest were thrown off, and the tall, slight, athletic form was developed with no concealment but the shirt and the closely-girt trowsers. The shoes followed, and as they did so Margaret Hayley well remembered where and when she had before seen that disrobing. She had grown white as the collar and cuffs of her gray chambray; and she was so paralyzed with wonder, fear, anxiety, and conflicting thought, that she could not speak, and was on the point of falling. Yet all this time Horace Townsend seemed to pay her no more attention or observation than he might have done had she been a wooden post or a stone monument erected at the same point of the plateau!
Not sixty seconds had elapsed after the throwing off of his outer garments, when the lawyer, without another word to any one, seized the rope, looked over the edge to see that the Rambler was still hanging to his thorn, lowered down the line until the loop was nearly opposite to him, then carried up the other end and with the volunteered assistance of one of the young men firmly secured it with two or three turns and as many knots, around the trunk of a stout sapling.