CHAPTER IX
WHAT HAPPENED TO PRISCILLA
James followed leisurely after in the path Polly had taken, mopping his perspiring forehead and thinking uncomplimentary things about the weather.
“Yes, children don’t mind runnin’ when it’s ninety-four in the shade,” he observed, “but as for me, you don’t catch me hurryin’ myself to-day, not for nothin’ nor nobody. Hark! What’s that?”
A sharp, piercing, frantic cry tore the stillness into echoes and went resounding down the length of the gorge. The butler paused an instant; the cry was repeated again and again. Without more ado he started into a fierce run that brought him, in no time at all, to the threshold of Pine Lodge where, peering in, he saw Polly crouching on the further bench, leaning over the ledge and uttering shriek after shriek for help. He sprang to her side with a bound, gave one quick glance into the gloom of the ravine below and then, with a warning “Hush!” to her and an encouraging nod and smile to the white face turned toward him from a tangle of brush and gnarled roots upon the bank beneath, wheeled about and, like a flash, disappeared around the side of the summer-house.
Polly caught her breath in a queer, gulping sob. After what seemed to her like ages of time help had come! Now if Priscilla could but keep her hold upon that bare pine-tree root to which she was clinging! If the bare pine-tree root would not give way beneath her grasp! In some miraculous way she had escaped plunging headlong to the bottom of the gorge. Her fall had been broken by the tangle of wild bushes and the undergrowth of strong young saplings lining the bank, and in the quick second in which she felt the earth beneath her again she had managed to brace herself and cling to a supporting root. But her strength was almost gone and Polly could see that in a moment more her slender courage must give way. Would James never come? Why had he not leaped right over the side of the Lodge and reached Priscilla that way? It would have been quicker. Surely it would have been quicker! But James knew what he was about, if Polly did not. He had seen at a glance that the weight of a heavier body might readily dislodge the insecure rocks and earth that were serving to support the little girl and that his only safe course was to skirt the Lodge, go to a farther point of the bank and, by slipping and sliding down, as best he might, reach the bottom of the ravine and rescue Priscilla from below. It was, in reality, but a few seconds before Polly saw him again, swinging himself over the little rail that fenced in the bank, and dropping carefully down, down from rock to rock to the bed of the shallow stream that flowed at the base of the gorge. Once at the bottom he was less impeded. In a twinkling he had reached the point where Priscilla hung, had found a firm foothold, and was urging her to drop into one of his strong arms while he clung to the supporting roots of a towering pine with the other. Polly watched him with straining eyes.
“Don’t be afraid! Drop!” commanded James encouragingly.
Whether Priscilla heard him or not Polly could not tell, but the frantic grasp of her little fingers around the root did not relax and her white face and wide-open eyes stared up blindly from out of the soft gloom below without a trace of life in them. “Don’t be afraid! Drop!” repeated James.
He drew himself up an inch or two higher and flung his strong arm tight about her. It was not an instant too soon for, with a sudden, sharp snap and crack of sundering wood the half-rotten root she clung to gave way beneath her gripping fingers. The sound of it and the feeling that she had lost her support, seemed the only things she had reason enough left to realize. With a long, low cry of despair her arms dropped to her sides and her eyelids closed upon her staring eyes.