"Daniel! are you sure?"—for Penn cannot, will not believe—it is too terrible!
Daniel is very sure; and he withdraws from the insufferable heat, to which his companion appears insensible.
"There is a gorge just above there; perhaps she escaped into the gorge. O, if I had known!" groans the half-distracted youth, thinking how near he must have been to her when the fire awoke him.
He still hopes that Dan's vision of her in the fire was but the hallucination of a bewildered brain. Yet no effort will he spare, no danger will he shun. The entrance to the gorge is all a gulf of flame; and the woods are blazing upwards along the cliffs, and all the forest beyond is turning to a sea of fire. Yet the gorge must be reached. Back again up the steep slope they climb. Penn flies to the verge of the cliff. He looks down: the chasm is all a glare of light. There runs the red-gleaming brook. He sees the logs, the stones, the mosses, all the wild entanglement, deep below. But no Virginia. He runs almost into the crackling flames, in order to peer farther down the gorge. Then he darts away in the opposite direction, along the very brink of the precipice, among the fire-lit trees,—Pepperill stupidly following. He seizes hold of a sapling, and, with his foot braced against its root, swings his body forward over the chasm, the better to gaze into its depths. From that position he casts his eye up the gorge. He sees the cascade falling over the ledge in a sheet of ruddy foam. He discovers the upper gorge; sees a monster of the forest come plunging and plashing down to the fall, and there lift himself on his haunches to look;—and what is that other object, half hidden by a drooping bough? It is Virginia clinging to the rocks.
A moment before, had Penn made the discovery of the young girl still unharmed by fire, his happiness would have been supreme. But now joy was checked by an appalling fear. The bear might seize her, or with a stroke of his paw hurl her from his path.
Penn caught hold of the bough that impeded his view, and saw how precarious was her hold. He dared not so much as call to her, or shout to frighten the monster away, lest, her attention being for an instant distracted, she might turn her head, lose her balance, and fall backwards from the rocks.
"Durned if she ain't thar!" said Dan, excitedly. "But she's got a powerful slim chance with the bar!"
"Come with me!" said Penn.
He ran to the upper gorge, showed himself on the bank above the cascade, and shouted. The bear, as he anticipated, turned and looked up at him. Virginia at the same time saw her deliverer.
"Hold on! I'll be with you in a minute!" he cried in a voice heard above the noise of the waterfall and the roar of the conflagration.