The next moment, dragging the rope after her by the other end, she was scaling the cliff. Forty feet up, where a gnarled and dwarfed tree rooted in the crevices, shs paused. Passing the rope across the tree-trunk, as over a hook, she drew in the slack and made fast to a boulder of several hundred-weight.
"Good for the girl!" Francis applauded to Henry.
Both men had grasped her plan, and success depended merely on her ability to dislodge the boulder and topple it off the ledge. Five precious minutes were lost, until she could find a dead branch of sufficient strength to serve as a crowbar. Attacking the boulder from behind and working with tense coolness while her two lovers continued to sink, she managed at the last to topple it over the brink.
As it fell, the rope tautened with a jerk that fetched an involuntary grunt from Henry's suddenly constricted chest. Slowly, he arose out of the quicksand, his progress being accompanied by loud sucking reports as the sand reluctantly released him. But, when he cleared the surface, the boulder so outweighed him that he shot shoreward across the crust until directly under the purchase above, when the boulder came to rest on the ground beside him.
Only Francis' head, arms, and tops of shoulders were visible above the quicksand when the end of the rope was flung to him. And, when he stood beside them on terra firma, and when he shook his fist at the quicksand he had escaped by so narrow a shave, they joined with him in deriding it. And a myriad ghosts derided them back, and all the air about them was woven by whispering shuttles into an evil texture of mockery.
CHAPTER XIV
"WE can't be a million miles away from it," Henry said, as the trio came to pause at the foot of a high steep cliff. "If it's any farther on, then the course lies right straight over the cliff, and, since we can't climb it and from the extent of it it must be miles around, the source of those flashes ought to be right here."
"Now could it have been a man with looking-glasses?" Leoncia ventured.
"Most likely some natural phenomenon," Francis answered. "I'm strong on natural phenomena since those barking sands."
Leoncia, who chanced to be glancing along the face of the cliff farther on, suddenly stiffened with attention and cried, "Look!" r