For a moment, I could scarcely realize the truth; but found that he had fallen through the luxuriant fringe of creeping plants, wild vines, and yellow gourds which hung over the brow of the chasm; but having caught a tough vine tendril or branch in his descent, he swung by it over the black profundity, clinging with seamanlike tenacity by both hands, and uttering the most piteous cries for mercy, or for that succour which I was totally unable to render, even had I been disposed to do so.
Cautiously I drew near and surveyed him.
The chasm was about twenty feet wide. Its walls descended sheer into profound obscurity below, for a hundred feet and more—perhaps, for aught man can learn, into the bowels of the earth.
About five feet from the side on which I stood, the wretched Knuckleduster swung by the vine-branch, which he clutched as tenaciously as before he had clutched me, with his felon hands. His face was alternately pale as death, or flushed with crimson, as the blood rushed backward from heart to head.
My face and mouth were covered with blood; my limbs ached with bruises; my throat had been compressed in that ruffianly struggle to the verge of suffocation: thus my heart boiled with rage; I was pitiless as a tiger, and heard his entreaties—his offers to be my slave for life, with loathing and with laughter; but they ended in a howl of mingled fury and despair, when I drew from my breast-pocket his large clasped knife, and opened it with grim deliberation.
"Abandoned wretch, the odds are now in my favour," said I; "you are helpless—I have no power to save you, even if I would; but I may hasten the fast-running sands of your evil life. The time has come when you must taste of that bitterness you have so freely dealt out to others—the bitterness of death! So, villain, receive the fate you were about to accord to me!"
At these words I slashed the sharp knife across the tough tendril of the gourd-vine. It parted, and Knuckleduster at once vanished into the awful profundity below, and with the scream of a despairing spirit. To what depth he fell, I know not, for no sound followed his disappearance.
My hair seemed to bristle up, and heavily the hot bead-drops rolled over my brow!
I thanked Heaven for my narrow escape—for the retribution thus placed in my hands, and turned away with little more regret than if I had dealt a finishing blow to an expiring reptile. I had already fought my way over too many slain heaps of good and gallant hearts, for the impression made upon me by the fate of this man—or the mode in which I had hastened it—to be very lasting or very profound.
Hurrying to the summit of the cliff on which he had assaulted me, breathless lest I should be too late to signal the ship whose appearance had caused this conflict and unforeseen catastrophe, I looked around for her in an agony of suspense.