Close behind him spoke a voice so hoarse and low-pitched with horror that it sounded like a man’s––“Drop that bar! drop it!”
With the swiftness of a wolf, he bounded sideways along the rim-rock. In the same lightning movement, he whirled face about and whipped his Colt’s from its holster. His finger was crooking against the trigger before he saw who it was that confronted him. The hammer fell in the same instant that he twitched the muzzle up and sideways. The heavy bullet scorched the girl’s cheek.
Above the crashing report rose a wild cry, “Miss Chuckie––God!”
Through the blinding, stinging powder-smoke she saw him stagger backwards as if to flee from what he thought he had done. His foot went down over the sharp edge. He flung up his hands and dropped into the abyss.
She did not shriek. She could not. Her tongue 372 clove to the roof of her mouth. Her heart stopped beating. She crumpled down and lay gasping. But the fascination of horror spurred her to struggle to her knees and creep over to peer down from the place where he had fallen.
Beneath her was only blank, utter darkness. No sound came up out of the deep except only that ceaseless reverberation of the hidden river. Twelve hundred feet down, the falling man had struck glancingly upon the smooth side of an out-jutting rock and his crushed body had been flung far out and sideways. It plunged into the rapids below the barrier and was borne away down the cañon. But this the girl could not have seen even in midday.
She looked for the red star of the distant fire where she knew her brother was lying. She could not see it. The point upon which the falling man had struck shut off her view. The other side of the split rock was where she and Genevieve had looked down through the glasses and seen Blake. She failed to realize the difference in the change of position. Her horror deepened. She thought that Gowan had hurled straight down to the bottom with all the terrific velocity of that sheer drop, and that he had plunged upon the fire and upon the dear form outstretched beside it, to crush and mangle and be crushed and mangled. The thought was too frightful for human endurance.
A long time she lay in a swoon, her head on the very 373 edge of the brink. It was the wailing of the hungry, frightened baby that at last called her back to life and action. She dragged herself up around to the hiding place. The neglected baby was not easy to quiet. The cream had soured. There was nothing that she could give him except water. All the eggs that were left she had put in the knapsack that Ashton was carrying down to her brother. The baby now showed the full reflex of his mother’s long hours of anxiety and fear. He fretted and cried and would not be comforted.
The chill of approaching dawn forced her to rebuild the outburnt fire. The warm glow and the play of the flames diverted the child and hushed his outcry. Holding him so that he might continue to watch the dancing tongues of fire, the girl sat motionless, going over and over again in her mind all that had occurred since the tattered, bleeding, purple-faced climber had come straining up out of the depths.... It could not have happened––it was all a hideous dream.... Would they never come? Must she sit here forever––alone!