“You-all kin jest nacherly crawl up thet-thar ladder,” he announced, “or we’ll sling ye on the end of a rope, an’ h’ist ye. Thet’ll tumble ye round an’ bump ye agin the rocks quite some. But 223 ye’re the doctor. If ye’ll climb up, I’ll leave yer han’s loose, an’ foller cluss behind ye, so ye kain’t fall. Hit’s shore wobbly, but hit’s safe. Dan Hodges hain’t aimin’ to git his neck broke—ner to let the law break it fer him!” he added, in a lower tone to himself.
But Plutina caught the words. She made nothing of them at the time; afterward, she realized their significance, and thanked God for them.
In the end, the prisoner yielded to necessity and ventured to mount with reluctant slowness. She found, to her intense relief, that the strength was returning to her body. She no longer felt the pervasive lassitude. The physical improvement reacted on her mind to restore confidence in her powers. She realized that probably the only danger lay in her own faltering, and she resolved to overcome her natural dread, to bend all her energies to a safe performance of the task. Despite her hatred of the man, she found unspeakable comfort in the sight of his great hairy hands clutching the ropes on either side of her at the height of her waist. But, as she mounted, the space beneath grew fearsome to her, and she raised her eyes and held them steadily on the distance above, as she had learned to do in clambering with her lover.
Somehow, now, the thought of Zeke heartened 224 Plutina. Swinging dizzily in the abyss, with the arms of her jailer about her, there flowed into her soul a new courage. It was without reason, an absurdity, a folly, but, oh, what a solace to her spirit! Under the stimulus of it, she ascended more rapidly. The pinched, ugly face of Garry Hawks, glowering down at her from the ledge, did not dismay her, even though the thought flashed on her brain that now this man whom she had wounded could hurl her to destruction by a touch. She had no fear of him; only pressed upward steadily. In another moment, her head passed above the level of the ledge. She took the hand Garry Hawks held out and climbed upon the narrow support, where she shrank back against the cliff, after one glance into the gulf yawning at her feet. The level space was a scant yard in width here, and lessened on the side away from the falls, until it ceased entirely. In the other direction, it ran, broadening a very little, to where a tiny cleft showed in the precipice. Plutina guessed that this marked the entrance to a cavern. Despite the bravery of her changed mood, the eerie retreat daunted her by its desolate isolation. Then, Hodges climbed upon the ledge, and she heard his shout, coming faintly to her ears above the roar of the cascade which fell just beyond the cavern’s mouth.
“Welcome, home, Honey!” he bawled, with his 225 detested jocularity. “They hain’t nobody a-goin’ to butt in on our love-makin’ up hyar.”
Tittering and leering, he seized the girl by the arm, and led her, unresisting, to the cranny that was the door of the cave. A glance over her shoulder showed Garry Hawks on his knee, hauling up the ladder. She knew that with its disappearance there would remain nought by which the searchers could guess whither she had vanished, or how. Once again, courage went out of her. In its place was despair.
CHAPTER XX
The cave into which Plutina now entered was a small, uneven chamber, some three yards in width at its highest point. It extended back for a little way, but the roof sloped downward so sharply that only in the central space could the girl stand upright, and even there Hodges had to stoop. On the far side was a hole in the rocky wall. It was hardly a yard in height, but the faint glow that marked it was proof that it reached to the daylight outside. At the best, it could serve as a passage-way only to one creeping on hands and knees. So much Plutina perceived in the first curious survey of her prison. The inspection was rendered possible by the murky light of a tallow candle, fixed in its own grease to a fragment of stone near the center of the cavern.