Diana shook her head and turned toward her tent, while Enoch lighted his pipe and began his never-ending task of bringing in drift wood. He paused, a log on his shoulder, before Curly, who was squatting beside his muddy pan.
"Curly," he said, "is that stuff you have on Fowler and Brown, political, financial, or a matter of personal morals?"
"Personal morals and worse!" grunted Curly. "It's some story!"
Enoch turned away without comment. But the lines between his eyes deepened.
CHAPTER IX
THE CLIFF DWELLING
"Love! that which turns the meanest man to a god in some one's eyes! Yet I must not know it! Suppose I cast my responsibility to the winds and . . . and yet that sense of responsibility is all that differentiates me from Minetta Lane."—Enoch's Diary.
Diana began work on her films on a little folding table beside the spring. Enoch, throwing down his log close to the cave opening, paused to watch her. Jonas and Na-che, putting the cave in order, talked quietly to each other. Suddenly from the river, to the right, there rose a man's half choking, agonized shout and around the curve shot a skiff, bottom up, a man clinging to the gunwale. The water was too wild and swift for swimming.
"The rope, Judge, the rope!" cried Mack.
Enoch picked up a coil of rope, used for staking the horses, and ran to Mack who snatched it, twirled it round his head and as the boat rushed by him, the noosed end shot across the gunwale. The man caught it over his wrist and it was the work of but a few moments to pull him ashore.