Love and fear combined with hate to lend wings to Harry Winkle. His brain cleared and clouded again; but, with the clearing came strength; that remained. He flew down the cañon with a speed that was prodigious. Yet Edith had had a start that would have rendered his efforts unavailing if she had gone straight and unchecked forward. The thought that such would be the case, combining with the burning hate which Endicott's late attempt on his life had aroused, brought back the confusion, and he passed over a few hundred yards of ground without sight or hearing. A regiment of soldiers, a tribe of Indians, might have passed him unheeded. When he came around the last crook in Crooked Cañon, and the straight vista which led to the sheer precipice opened up before him, he came back to life, real and earnest, again. He took in the picture before him—the woman he loved struggling in the arms of the man he hated. He would have shot Endicott on the spot could he have done so without danger to Edith; he brought his rifle to a ready. While he looked, running as he looked, she broke away from the man, gave a great bound, and he heard her despairing cry echoed by the ring of firearms. He did not stop, though, to see who had fired, at whom, or with what effect. When two great master-passions clash, one of them is, for the time at least, ground to the wall. When love and hate became antagonistic in his breast, hate was swept aside like a feather in the wind.
To the right ran the narrow, winding, rugged path by which Blaze had led him up into Crooked Cañon. Down this he darted with his teeth clenched, and his hands, now unincumbered by the useless rifle he had cast aside, extended. He did not even give a cry or utter a moan, but there was a fear of a horror in his eye that seemed wilder than any half-crazed light that had ever shone there in the time of his previous agonies. To the right and left of him the jagged rocks heaved up in great billows, horribly suggestive. He wished himself back in the roaring surf of the previous years. When, half-way down, he came to a ledge that led away and around toward the precipice, visible and accessible by a crevice in the side of the gulch he was descending, he could bear the suspense no more. No need to pause and think if its path was dangerous when once there had taken possession of him the thought that by following it he could sooner catch sight of Edith Van Payne or her mortal remains. Through, out, along, all quiveringly expectant, and ears open for a cry or a groan, sped Winkle.
And so, after the weary, maddening years of separation, alone, suspended, as it were, between earth and heaven, on a narrow footing that seemed all too precarious for life and living mortals, met at the last Harry Winkle and Edith Van Payne!
When from Charles Endicott's arms Edith had rushed to a leap she feared as fatal, there came to her the stupor of falling scarce broken by the crash through the top of the kindly intervening cedar. Bruised and hard shaken, she lay coiled up at the foot of the tree, ready, at a half-conscious movement, to fall still further, even to eternal nothingness, when there crawled toward her a man, through what perils he was passing, or how he was avoiding them he knew not. He only knew that his soul's other half was hanging over certain death, with no other eye than his to see her danger, and no other arm than his to rescue her.
At last! From off the knee of the cedar he drew her, up onto the wider footing of the yet-narrow ledge. Kneeling, with his back against the wall of solid rock, he held in his arms his own long-lost darling! Away above him Martin, Blaze and the others stood, at the brink, peering downward. He heard their shouts like the remembrance of a noise in a dream. The sound of a gentle sigh escaping from her lips drowned all other voices. He clutched her closer, looked at her wan, white cheeks, and, as her wild eyes opened, covered her mouth with kisses. He thought, too, that her lips moved to meet his. For a moment or two longer she lay in his arms cold, nerveless, colorless, almost lifeless. Yet she was the woman he loved!
Consciousness began slowly to return. She hid her face on his breast at its first dawning and slowly gathered strength. When at last she heard the loud beating of his heart she looked up, for the first time forgetting the danger from which she had fled, and the danger from which she had been saved. She saw a face, firm-set, yet beaming, resolution yet happiness penciled thereon. With a scream she made an almost fatal attempt to throw herself from his embrace.
The steel-set arm wound itself tighter around her waist, with steady strength drawing her again closely to its owner's breast.
"Harry! You here! Let me go! Let me go to death; but let me go!"
"Not so, my darling. Here, on my breast you rest. Fate's last bolt has been shot, and I laugh now at the empty quiver. Mine you are, now and forever."