“You cannot do it, my brother,” called out Stephanus; “the shield of the Lord would turn the bullet aside and His hand would bear you up from the depths.”
“Stand, I tell you.—Stand.—Another step and you are a dead man.”
Stephanus continued to approach, so Gideon lifted his gun and pulled the trigger, but the powder flashed in the pan. Stephanus never faltered, but walked composedly to where the desperate man was hastily endeavouring to reprime the gun with loose powder from his pocket. Stephanus laid his hand on his brother’s shoulder and Gideon at once ceased in his attempt,—the gun slipped from his nervous fingers and crashed upon the stones, and he sank, swooning, to the ground.
When he regained consciousness Gideon found himself supported by the arms of his brother, whose eyes, deep with love and dimmed with pity, looked steadily into his own. Then his sin, his anguish and his terror slipped from him like a cast-off garment, and for the first time in his manhood he wept.
It did not need much to be said on either side for an understanding, full and complete, to be at once established. It was as though the unveiled souls looked at each other, revealing all and wholly revealed.
Before turning to retrace their steps the brothers stood for a short space and looked forth across the awful, Titanic chaos, in the convoluted depths of which the weary river hurried improvidently along with its wasted load of fertilising wealth. The sun had nearly sunk; already the dark chasms were full of almost opaque gloom, above which the rarefied air quivered around each sun-scorched mountain head, seeming to cap it with thin, colourless flame.
In the north-east a great crudded cloud lifted its soaring towers into the blue heart of the awful aether. Pure white on the side lit by the sun, on the other it was deep purple, and through it shafts of lightning were incessantly playing. Higher and higher it towered, sweeping past at a distance of a few miles. Now and then during the pauses of the thunder could be heard the low roar of the rain which fell like the fringe of a pall from the lower margin of the immense mass. Then they knew that the black, two-years’ drought was over,—that along the track over which they had so laboriously struggled a few short days since, the flowers would be bursting forth in a few hours and the rocky depressions brimming with silvern water.
Stephanus’ wagon had in the meantime arrived and was standing, outspanned, close to that of Gideon. Elsie stood near it, her face turned to the mighty thunder-chariot from which a refreshing wind, laden with the ichor of the fallen rain, stirred the richness of her hair. She turned as her quick ear caught the sound of their approaching footsteps, and it seemed to them as though the Spirit of Peace inhabited her and looked out from the unfathomable depths of her sightless eyes.