“No, build a fire,” replied the engineer. He raised a heavy hand to point towards the high end of the 331 barrier. “Driftwood up there. Bring it down. I’ll light it.”
“Light it––how?” asked Ashton incredulously.
“Get it,” ordered Blake.
Ashton hurried across the crest of the barrier to where it sloped up and merged in the precipice foot. The mass of rock that formed the barrier had fallen out of the face of the lower part of the cañon wall, leaving a great hollow in the rock. But above the hollow the upper precipices beetled out and rose sheer, on up the dizzy heights to the verge of the chasm. Contrasted with this awesome undermined wall, the broken, steeple-sloped precipices adjoining it on the upstream side looked hopefully scalable to Ashton. He marked out a line of shelves and crevices running far up to where the full sunlight smiled on the rock.
But Blake had told him to fetch wood for a fire, that they might signal the watchers on the heights. He hastened up over the rocks to the heaps of logs and branches stranded on the high end of the barrier by the freshets. Every year the river, swollen by the spring rains, brimmed over the top of this natural dam.
Yet not all the heaps lying on the ledges were driftwood. As Ashton approached, he was horrified to see that the largest and highest situated piles were nothing else than masses of bones. Drawn by a gruesome fascination, he climbed up to the nearest of the ghastly heaps. The loose ribs and vertebræ scattered down 332 the slope seemed to him the size of human ribs and vertebræ. He shuddered as they crunched under his tread.
Then he saw a skull with spiral-curved horns. He looked up the cañon wall, and understood. The high-heaped bones were the skeletons of sheep. In a flash, he remembered Isobel’s account of Gowan, that first day up there on the top of the mesa. Not only had the puncher killed six men; he had, together with other violent men of the cattle ranges, driven thousands of sheep over into the cañon––and this was the place.
Sick with horror and loathing, Ashton ran to snatch up an armful of the smaller driftwood and hurry back down to the center of the barrier. He found Blake lying white and still. But beside him were three cartridges from which the bullets had been worked out. At the terse command of the engineer, Ashton ground one of the older and drier pieces of wood to minute fragments on a rock.
Blake emptied the powder from one of the cartridges into the little pile of splinters, and holding the edge of another shell against a corner of the rock, tapped the cap with a stone. At the fifth stroke the cap exploded. The loosened powder of the cartridge flared out into the powder-sprinkled tinder. Soon a fire of the dry, half-rotted driftwood was blazing bright and almost smokeless in the twilight of the depths. 333
“Now haul up the rod,” directed Blake, and he lay back to bask in the grateful warmth.