The girls held back when they looked down the frightful abyss so well named, but the spinster educators went on, determined to get geological specimens if they died for it, and Helen, in a spirit of bravado, leaped ahead of the exploring party and sprang down the rocks like a veritable mountain goat. Her cheeks were still glowing over the remarks of that enfant terrible, Bobby.
“Be careful, Helen!” called Lewis Somerville, who had constituted himself squire of spinsters and was helping those intrepid geologists down the slippery rocks. Helen tossed her head at her cousin and went on in her mad descent, swinging from rock to rock with the occasional help of a scrub oak that had somehow gained foothold on the barren boulders.
“Look out for snakes, Helen!” cried Douglas, who had turned back with the rest of the party.
But Helen heeded nothing and seemed bent on reaching the lowest point of the chasm. It flashed across her mind that she was a little like the Englishman. He was trying to escape from the buzzing and roaring in his head while she was in a mad race with her conscience. Why should she be so unkind and sharp with Dr. Wright? She didn’t know.
She could hear the people above talking and their voices seemed thin and far away, so deep had she penetrated into the gorge.
“Jest a leetle below whar Miss Helen is standing was whar they picked up the Englishman,” she could hear Josh’s peculiar mountain voice recite before the party moved off back toward the temporary camp where they had had luncheon. The ladies on science bent, their squire, Dr. Wright and she were the only explorers left.
“Right down there is where that poor man fell,” she said to herself. “I don’t believe it was suicide, either,” and then she blushed for agreeing with Dr. Wright. “But it would be so easy to fall from any of these slippery crags. He might have been on the opposite cliff, which is certainly a precarious spot, and vertigo might have attacked him, and he might have gone over backwards, clutching at the scrub oaks as he fell, and gone down, down—why, what is that hanging in the tree there?”
Something was certainly caught in the branches of a dwarf tree that clung to the unfriendly rocks with determined roots—something that looked like a wallet, but she could not be sure.
“Lewis!” she called, but Lewis was so taken up with hanging by his toes and reaching for a particularly rare specimen of fern that one of the dames wanted for her collection, that he did not hear her calling.
“Will I do?” asked Dr. Wright from somewhere above her.