There, in the shelter of a clump of brush almost under the end of the osier bridge he compelled Huayca to sit down: Bill bound him securely in that position. Then he walked a few feet away and gathered some small twigs and a few larger sticks. With those he made ready a fire. Once it was ignited and began to blaze he fired his revolver twice.
That was the signal. Those on the ledge grew tense. Bill—good old Bill!—had done his part. He was racing back across the chasm toward the steps. In an hour or a little more he would be in their midst. But—in the meanwhile!——
The men on the pass heard the shots. They began to look around. Where had they come from? They knew what firearms were. But the sound had not come from the ledge above them: indeed, the people on the ledge had been so quiet that it might be that they had gone—if there was any way for them to go. And there was: the mountaineers knew there was a cleft in the walls above that ledge.
One of them ran around the bend in the pass and shouted, pointing. They all rushed in his direction.
Far below, and in the extreme distance of the chasm’s far side, they saw a tiny fire and what might be a man sitting near it.
The ones on the ledge, then, they argued hastily, had used the passage through the cleft and down the old Inca steps.
They must be over the chasm, camped there, thinking they were safe because there was no way to get at them. The men who hated them and sought their lives could not climb to the ledge and get to them through the cleft: but there was another way to reach them, camped there in the chasm.
Stones! Stones would reach that camp!
The men, shouting like wild things heated by the lust of the kill, snatched up hands full of large stones: several even lugged large boulders.
It was a bad time for Huayca—or it would have been only that Bill, more kindly than the Indian would have been, had adjusted the bonds so that strenuous effort would loosen them after a while.