"I can't do it, colonel," I gasped.
"You must," he said.
He tried to draw me up, but I was too heavy a weight for a single arm. He was half over the gulf himself, but his left arm was wound like a cable around the rock. His face was red as a beet and his breath was short, but he showed no inclination to let go.
"You can't do it, colonel," I gasped. "Save yourself! No need for both of us to drop."
"What sort of a man do you take me to be?" he asked, indignantly.
He breathed hard and made a great effort to pull me up. A flake of blood appeared on his temple. I was raised up about a foot and got a new grip on some of the shrubs, but there I stopped. I could not lift myself up any farther, nor could the colonel lift me.
I could hear men plunging through the snow in their haste; so my shouts had been heard by more than the colonel. I put my voice to its best uses again. The colonel said nothing, but how he hung on to that old army overcoat! The men had begun to shout, and I never ceased, wanting them to make sure of the direction. Weather-seamed faces looked over the brink. Two or three pairs of hands grasped the overcoat and pulled me up. Somebody else seized the colonel, and I have but a hazy idea of the next five minutes. A man who has been hanging at the verge of death gets tired in both brain and muscle, and I needed rest.
When things came around all right again, I was sitting up on the snow and drinking out of a brown bottle. The colonel was lying on that blessed overcoat, his head in his daughter's lap and his face quite pale. They were binding a white cloth around his temples.