“For Heaven’s sake, Miss Breen, get away from here. Can’t you understand? Can’t you see how senseless——”
Miss Breen did a totally unexpected thing. She laughed loudly. Then, even as Nash was staring as upon a mad-woman, she stopped, trembled, and instantly had thrown herself face down to the rocks, pillowing her head in her arms, and sobbing wildly, hysterically, like a frightened child.
CHAPTER XX.
AFTERWARD.
To say that Nash was amazed at this mingled display of tears and laughter, would be putting it mildly. He reached out his arm and attempted to grip hers. But she had fallen just a few inches too far away.
“Miss Breen,” he called. “Miss Breen!”
Her sobbing had stopped as abruptly as it had come. And although she did not answer him, there came to his ears another sound, which like the striking of a gong in a fire house, immediately sent his pulses racing like mad.
Some one was shouting. Lifting his head Nash answered back. Then the still night air was rent by a chorus of maddening yells. Nash could not reason it all out for the moment, but turning his eyes, he saw far below him a dozen men climbing up the slope—and at their head he made out the figure of his subforeman—the man who was to have pressed the button that would have torn asunder the mountaintop.
“Hello!” came the leader’s voice. “That you, Nash?”
Nash answered. Almost instantly, it appeared, he was surrounded by the members of the “coyote” gang.
“We thought something was up,” the foreman was saying, “and thank God there was, too! I pressed the button at eight o’clock—and nothing happened. I knew the battery was O. K., so the only thing I could think of was that the wires had been broken.”