Dropping a charge into one of his barrels, he fired, but failed to kill the bird, which, hit somewhere, beat the earth with its wings and rolled or ran forward into the mist. Dropping his gun, Roland darted forward after it—the tendril of a bramble caught his feet, and a gasping cry escaped him as he fell heavily on his face and then downward—he knew not where!
Instinctively and desperately he clutched something; it was turf on a rocky edge. He felt it yielding; a small tree, a silver birch, grew near, and wildly he caught a branch thereof; and swung out over some profundity, he knew not what or where, till like a flash of lightning there came upon his memory the Burn Cleugh, a deep, rocky chasm, which had been the mysterious terror of his boyhood—as the fabled shade of a treacherous kelpie, a hairy fiend with red eyes and red claws—a rent or rift in the low hills some miles from his home, and at the bottom of which, about sixty feet and more below, the burn referred to as passing through the Earl's Haugh, and near the hamlet of the same name, flowed towards Eden.
'Save me—God save me!' rose to his lips, and with each respiration as he clung to the branch and the bead-drops started to his forehead, he lived a lifetime—a lifetime as it were of keenest agony.
He knew well the profoundity of the rocky abyss that yawned in obscurity below him, and he heard the slow gurgle of the burn as it chafed against the stones that barred its downward passage, and, mechanically, as one in a dream who fears to fall, he strove to sway his body upward, but could find no rest for his footsteps, and felt that the birch branch to which he clung was gradually but surely—rending! He had no terror of death in itself—none of death in the battlefield, as we have shown; but from such a fate as this he shrank; his soul seemed to die within him, and with every respiration there seemed to come the agony of a whole lifetime.
His nerve was gone, and no marvel that it was so. He might escape instant death; but not the most dreadful mutilation; and, sooth to say, he dreaded that a thousand times more than death.
One glance downward into that dark and misty chasm was in itself a summons to death, and he knew well the terrible bed of stones and boulders that lay below.
He became paralyzed—paralyzed with a great and stunning fear. The rending of the branch continued; his arms were waxing faint and strained; his fingers feeble; and it was only a question of moments between time and eternity—fall—fall he must—how far—how deep down—the depth he had forgotten.
The suspense was horrible; yet it was full of the dire certainty of a dreadful end.
Every act and scene of his past life came surging up to memory—the memory of less than a minute, now.
The branch parted; but, still grasping it, down he went whizzing through the mist—there was a stunning crash as he fell first on a ledge of rock and then into the stream's stony bed below, and then sight and sense and sound passed away from him!