Again they waited. Presently the fire scattered, and a streak of flame traveled across the cañon to a point beneath them. Soon the red spot of a new fire glowed in the shadows so directly under them that a pebble dropped from their fingers must have grazed down the precipices and fallen into the flames.
After several minutes of alternate peering through the glasses, Genevieve handed them back to Isobel for the third time, and rose to go to her baby.
“It is Tom alone,” she said, divining the truth. “Lafayette has helped him to the best place they could find, and now he is coming up to us for help.”
When she had fed the baby and soothed him to 346 sleep, she laid out bandages and salve, set a full coffeepot on the fire started by Gowan, and examined the cream and eggs brought back by the puncher on his second night trip to the ranch.
Nearly an hour had passed when Isobel called in joyous excitement: “I see him! I see him! Down there where the sunlight slants on the rocks. Oh! how bravely! how swiftly he climbs!”
Genevieve went to take the glasses and look. Several moments were lost before she could locate the tiny figure creeping up that stairway of the giants. But, once she had fixed the glasses upon him, she could see him clearly. Isobel had well expressed it when she said that he was climbing swiftly and bravely. Running along shelves, clambering ledges, following up the crevices that offered the best foothold, the tattered climber fought his dizzy way upwards, upwards, ever upwards!
Rarely, after some particularly hard scramble, he flung himself down on a shelf or on one of the steps of the Titanic ladder, to rest and summon energy for another upward rush. His good fortune seemed as marvelous as his endurance and daring. He never once slipped and never once had to turn back from an ascent. As if guided by instinct or divine intuition, he chose always the safest, the least difficult, the most continuously scalable way on all that perilous pitch.
So swift an ascent was beyond the ordinary powers 347 of man. It could have been made only by a maniac or by one to whom great passion had given command of those latent forces of the body that enable the maniac to fling strong men about like children. Long before the climber reached the top of that terrible ladder, his hands were torn and bleeding, the tattered garments were half rent from his limbs and body, his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets.
Yet ever he climbed, ledge above ledge, crevice after crevice, until at last only one steep pitch rose above him. A rope came sliding down the rock. A voice––the sweetest voice in all the wide world of sunshine and life––called to him. It sounded very far away, farther than the bounds of reality, yet he heard and obeyed. He slipped the loop of the rope down over his shoulders and about his heaving forebody. Then suddenly his labor was lightened. His leaden body became winged. It floated upwards.
When he came to himself, a bitter refreshing wetness was soothing his parched mouth and black swollen tongue; gentle fingers were spreading balm on his torn hands; the loveliest face of earth or heaven was downbent over him, its tender blue eyes brimming with tears of compassion and love. Softly his head and shoulders were raised, and hot coffee was poured down his throat as fast as he could swallow.