“He can help pull up the rest,” Cliff urged. “My father can’t climb, he will have to be drawn up.”
“Hurry, then, Bill,” said Mr. Whitley. In the darkness they began to feel the rope twitch and jerk, and heard the scrape of boots feeling for a foothold on the fairly rough side of the aqueduct. Then, far up the side they saw, in the light from the reddening sky, Bill, monkeylike, climbing like a sailor.
Soon the rope came down again. There was a loop at its end. “Sit in the loop and hang on,” Cliff and Mr. Whitley both urged.
“No,” said Mr. Gray. “I am not going until the girl is safe.” Caya was lifted for there was no time for argument. Bill and the eager father of the girl swung her in quick jerks upward.
Then the rope came down. “Wait!” said Pizzara. “Why not send the gold up now? I have tied the bundles together——”
A sharp push flung him aside. Mr. Whitley was at the end of his patience, seeing this man willing to risk their lives in preference to risking his gold. “You can send it up before you come,” he said.
There was a more ominous rumbling close at hand and they began to swarm up the rope as soon as the old man was safe. But Pizzara hung back. The rest were climbing like sailors, for there came the sound of water beginning to seep around an obstruction and there was a tiny wet pool running along under foot. While they climbed Pizzara took his final chance with his Fate or luck or patron Saint’s protection for he waited until he had made all the woolen thongs into a big knot and had swung that to the end of the rope: then he saw that he had no time to waste, for there was the beginning of a swirling torrent at his feet that swung him up and off his balance as he gripped the rope and began to surge upward. When his face topped the edge of a narrow step on which the others waited, he wore a sardonic grin which the growing light showed.
“I save the gold,” he said. “Haul him up.”
Cliff thought that Mr. Whitley was going to prevent that but Bill touched his arm: whispered, “Not yet—we will need the rope!”
They hauled up the gold, then, and were told to inch their way along the narrow ledge for a few feet to where, in the side wall, through long disuse, a great part had crumbled out, leaving a sort of rude cave, uneven of floor and jagged on its sides, but deep enough to enable them all to retire into the darkness at the back and be reasonably sure of not being seen. The rope was also out of sight and as they heard the roar of the waters rushing into the aqueduct, Cliff sighed.