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Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation, a novel by Robert Ames Bennet |
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Chapter 29. The Climber |
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_ CHAPTER XXIX. THE CLIMBER A day of anxiety, only partly relieved by those tiny flashes of light so far, far down in the awful depths; then the long night of ceaseless watching. Neither Genevieve nor Isobel had been able to sleep during those hours when no flash signaled up to them from the abysmal darkness. Then at last, a full hour after dawn on the mesa top, the down-peering wife had caught the flash that told of the renewal of the exploration. As throughout the previous day, Gowan brought the ladies food and whatever else they needed. Only the needs of the baby had power to draw its mother away from the canyon edge. Isobel moved always along the giddy verge wherever she could cling to it, following the unseen workers in the depths. On his first trip to the ranch, the puncher had brought Genevieve's field glasses--an absurdly small instrument of remarkable power. Three times the first day and twice the second morning she and Isobel had the joy of seeing their loved ones creeping along the abyss bottom at places where the sun pierced down through the gloom. They missed other chances because the canyon edge was not everywhere so easily approachable. Many times the flash of Blake's revolver passed unseen by them. Sometimes they had been forced away from the brink; sometimes the depths were cut off from their view by juttings of the vast walls. Yet now and again one or the other caught a flash that marked the advance of the explorers. Towards midday a last flash was seen by both above the turn where the canyon curved to run towards Dry Fork Gulch. Between this point and the sharp bend opposite the gulch the precipices overhung the canyon bottom. Carrying the baby, the two hastened to the bend, to heap up and light a great beacon fire of green wood. Gowan followed with the ponies, cool, silent and efficient. From the first he had seldom looked over into the canyon. His part was to serve Miss Chuckie and her friend, and wait. Like Ashton, he had failed to surmise the real significance of that tender parting between Blake and Isobel. His look had betrayed boundless amazement when he saw the wife of the man take the sobbing girl into her arms and comfort her. But he had spoken no word of inquiry; and every moment since, both ladies had been too utterly absorbed in their watch to talk to him of anything else. At last the exploration was nearing the turning point. Genevieve and Isobel lay on the edge of the precipice near the beacon fire, peering down for the flash that would tell of the last rod reading. Slowly the minutes dragged by, and no welcome signal flashed through the dark shadows. The usual interval between shots had passed. Still no signal. They waited and watched, with fast-mounting apprehension. Could the brave ones down in those fearsome depths have failed almost in sight of the goal? or could misfortune have overtaken them in that narrow, cavernous reach of the chasm so close to their objective point? At last--"There! there it is!" Together the two watchers saw the flash, and together they shrieked the glad discovery. Genevieve rose to go to her crying baby. Before she could silence him, Isobel screamed to her: "Another shot!--farther downstream! What can it mean?" Genevieve put down the still-sobbing baby and ran again to the verge of the precipice. Two minutes after the second flash there came a third, a few yards still farther along the canyon. "They have changed their plans. They are going downstream," said Genevieve. She caught up the long pole of the flag and ran to thrust it out opposite the point where she had seen the flash. Gowan was preparing for the return trip up along the canyon to the starting point. At Isobel's call, he silently turned the ponies about the other way and followed the excited watchers. As he did so, the girl perceived a fourth flash in the abyss, a hundred yards farther downstream. She hastened with the flag to a point a little beyond the place. When Genevieve had quieted the baby and overtaken Isobel, the latter was ready with a question: "You know Tom so well. Why is he going on down? He said that he would at once return after reaching the place where the head of the tunnel is to be." "He must have seen the beacon," replied Genevieve. "He could not have mistaken that. Something has forced him to change his plans. It may be they were swept down some place in the river that he knows they cannot re-ascend." "Oh! do not say it!" sobbed the girl. "If they cannot get back--oh! what will they do? How will they ever escape?" "Is there no other place?" asked Genevieve. "Think, dear. Is there no break in these terrible precipices?" "There's a place where the wall slopes back--but steep, oh, so steep! Yet it is barely possible--" The girl's voice sank, and she glanced about at Gowan. "It is just this side of where more than five thousand sheep were driven over into the canyon. That was four years ago. I have never since been able to go near the place." "Tom said that he rode all along the canyon for miles. You say it may be possible to climb up at that place. He must have seen it, and he has remembered it." "Then you think--?" "I know that if it is possible for anyone to climb the wall, Tom will climb it--and he will bring up Lafayette with him." "Dear Genevieve! You are so strong! so full of hope!" "Not hope, dear. It is trust. I know Tom better than you. That is all." "Another flash!" cried Isobel. "So soon, yet all that long way from the last! They are traveling far faster!" "Yes, they have finished with the levels," divined Genevieve. "We must hasten." Isobel called the news to the silent puncher, and all moved along to overtake the hurrying fugitives below. Though both parties went so much faster, Blake's frequent shots kept the anxious watchers above in closer touch than at any time before. At last they came to that Cyclopean ladder of precipices, rising one above the other in narrow steps, and all inclined at a giddy pitch far steeper than any house roof. Yet for a long way down them the field glasses showed their surfaces wrinkled with shelves and projecting ledges and creased with faults and crevices. The party went past this semi-break in the sheer wall, and halted on the out-jutting point of the rim where the luckless flock of sheep had been driven over to destruction. No reference was made to that ruthless slaughter of innocents. Gowan calmly set about preparing a camp. The ladies lay down to watch in the shade of a frost-cracked rock on the verge of the wall. Already the time had come and gone for the regular signal of the revolver shot. The watchers began to grow apprehensive. Still their straining eyes saw no flash in the depths. A half hour passed. Their apprehension deepened to dread. An hour--they were white with terror. Suddenly a tiny red spot appeared--not a flash that came and went like lightning, but a flame that remained and grew larger. "A fire!" cried Isobel. "They have halted and built a fire." Genevieve brought the flag and thrust it out over the edge. The inner end of the pole she wedged in a crevice of the split rock. "They have stopped to rest," she said. "It may be that Lafayette is worn out. But soon I trust they will be coming up." She looked through her glasses. The fire was burning its brightest. She discerned the prostrate figure beside the ledge. She watched it fixedly. Soon another figure appeared in the circle of firelight. It bent over the first, doing something with pieces of stick. "Look," whispered Genevieve, handing the glasses to her companion, "Tom is hurt. Lafayette is binding his leg. It is broken or badly strained.--Oh! will your father never come?" "Tom hurt? It can't be--no, no!" protested Isobel. But she too looked and saw. After a time she added breathlessly: "It can't be so bad! Lafe is helping him to rise.... They are starting this way--to the foot of the wall! They will be climbing up!" "But if his leg is injured!" differed Genevieve. Again they waited. Presently the fire scattered, and a streak of flame traveled across the canyon to a point beneath them. Soon the red spot of a new fire glowed in the shadows so directly under them that a pebble dropped from their fingers must have grazed down the precipices and fallen into the flames. After several minutes of alternate peering through the glasses, Genevieve handed them back to Isobel for the third time, and rose to go to her baby. "It is Tom alone," she said, divining the truth. "Lafayette has helped him to the best place they could find, and now he is coming up to us for help." When she had fed the baby and soothed him to sleep, she laid out bandages and salve, set a full coffeepot on the fire started by Gowan, and examined the cream and eggs brought back by the puncher on his second night trip to the ranch. Nearly an hour had passed when Isobel called in joyous excitement: "I see him! I see him! Down there where the sunlight slants on the rocks. Oh! how bravely! how swiftly he climbs!" Genevieve went to take the glasses and look. Several moments were lost before she could locate the tiny figure creeping up that stairway of the giants. But, once she had fixed the glasses upon him, she could see him clearly. Isobel had well expressed it when she said that he was climbing swiftly and bravely. Running along shelves, clambering ledges, following up the crevices that offered the best foothold, the tattered climber fought his dizzy way upwards, upwards, ever upwards! Rarely, after some particularly hard scramble, he flung himself down on a shelf or on one of the steps of the Titanic ladder, to rest and summon energy for another upward rush. His good fortune seemed as marvelous as his endurance and daring. He never once slipped and never once had to turn back from an ascent. As if guided by instinct or divine intuition, he chose always the safest, the least difficult, the most continuously scalable way on all that perilous pitch. So swift an ascent was beyond the ordinary powers of man. It could have been made only by a maniac or by one to whom great passion had given command of those latent forces of the body that enable the maniac to fling strong men about like children. Long before the climber reached the top of that terrible ladder, his hands were torn and bleeding, the tattered garments were half rent from his limbs and body, his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. Yet ever he climbed, ledge above ledge, crevice after crevice, until at last only one steep pitch rose above him. A rope came sliding down the rock. A voice--the sweetest voice in all the wide world of sunshine and life--called to him. It sounded very far away, farther than the bounds of reality, yet he heard and obeyed. He slipped the loop of the rope down over his shoulders and about his heaving forebody. Then suddenly his labor was lightened. His leaden body became winged. It floated upwards. When he came to himself, a bitter refreshing wetness was soothing his parched mouth and black swollen tongue; gentle fingers were spreading balm on his torn hands; the loveliest face of earth or heaven was downbent over him, its tender blue eyes brimming with tears of compassion and love. Softly his head and shoulders were raised, and hot coffee was poured down his throat as fast as he could swallow. He half roused from his daze. The swollen, cracked lips moved in faintly muttered words: "Leg broken--sends love--doing fine--project feasible--irrigation--no food--must rest--go down again." The eyes of the two ministering angels met. Genevieve bent down and pressed her lips to the purple, swollen-veined forehead. The heavy lids closed over the sunken eyes; but before he lapsed into the torpid sleep of exhaustion that fell upon him, the two succeeded in feeding him several spoonfuls of raw egg beaten in cream. He then sank into utter unconsciousness. Flaccid and inert as a corpse, he lay outstretched on the grassy slope while they bound up the cuts and bruises on his naked arms and shoulders and cut the broken, gaping boots from his bruised feet. His legs, doubly protected by the tough leather chapareras and thick riding leggins, had fared less cruelly than his arms, but his knees were raw and bleeding where the chaps had worn through on the rocks. _ |
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