Ashton had fallen into a fitful doze. The engineer stood up and silently groped his way to and fro on the shelf of rock, stretching and limbering his cramped muscles. He wasted no particle of energy; the moment he had relieved his stiffness he stretched out again. He lay contemplating that flame of love on the heights until it faded against the lessening blackness of the sky and the rays of the morning sun began to angle down the upper precipices.

He rose to take out two portions of food from the single pack in which he had bound up all the provisions. The portion for Ashton was small; his own was smaller. He roused the dozing man and placed the larger share of food in his hand.

"Don't drop it," he cautioned. "That's all I can let you have. We must go on rations until we can see a way out of this hole."

Ashton ate his meager breakfast without replying. The fire within him had burned to ashes. He was cold and dull and dispirited. He had failed. He would have been willing to sit and brood, and wait for God to answer his prayer.—But his waiting was not to be an inert lingering in the place where he had failed.

The moment the down-creeping daylight so lessened the gloom of the depths that Blake could take rod readings, he plunged over into the stream, with a curtly cheerful command for Ashton to prepare to follow. Too dejected even to resist, the younger man silently obeyed. When Blake signaled to him through the dimness, he held the rod on the last turning-point of the previous day, and lowered himself from the shelf down into the stream.

The evening before, the water at this point had come up to his waist. It was now only knee-deep. His surprise was so great that in passing Blake he broke his sullen silence to remark the fact and ask what could have caused the change.

"Melting of the snow on the high range," the engineer shouted in explanation. "Takes time for it to run down the canyon all these miles. River probably still falling. Will begin to rise about noon. Faster we get along now, the easier it will be. Hustle!"

Ashton responded mechanically to the will of his commander. For the time being his own will was almost paralyzed. The reaction from his long-sustained rage had left him dazed and nerveless. He had sunk into a state of fatalistic indifference. He moved quickly downstream from turning-point to turning-point, driven by Blake's will, but with a heedless recklessness that all Blake's warnings could not check.

Within the first hour he twice stumbled and went under while wading deep reaches of the river, and once he fell from a ledge, bruising himself severely and knocking a splinter from the rod. Half an hour later he lost his footing in descending a swift and narrow place that would have been impassable at high water. Had not Blake been below him he would never have come out alive.

The engineer leaped in and dragged the drowning man to safety, after a desperate struggle with the torrent. But in the wild swirl, both the food-pack and the rod went adrift. The moment he had rescued his companion, Blake rushed away downstream, leaping like a goat from rock to rock. He at last overtook the rod, caught in the eddy of a pool. Of the pack he could find no trace. He returned to Ashton and silently handed him the rod.

There was no need for him to admonish. The loss of all the food and the narrowness of his escape had sobered the younger man. He resumed his work with a cautious swiftness of movement that avoided all needless risks yet never hesitated to encounter and rush through the dangers that could not be avoided. In this he copied Blake.

All the time they were advancing down the angry torrent, deeper and deeper into its secret stronghold,—creeping, crawling, leaping, wading, swimming—step by step, turn after turn, wresting from the abyss that which the engineer was resolved to learn, even though he should learn, only to perish.

The day advanced. Steadfastly they struggled on down the bed of the river, twisting and crossing over with the winding course of the chasm; now between beetling precipices that shut out all sight of the blue-black sky; now in more open stretches where the Titanic walls swung apart and the glorious hot sun rays pierced down into the very depths to warm their drenched bodies and lighten their heavy spirits.

Ashton had long since lost all count of time. His watch had been smashed in his first fall of the day. But Blake seemed to have an intuitive sense of time. At fairly regular intervals he fired a shot to tell the watchers above the extent of their progress. Sometimes the answering flag-signal could be seen waving from the rim of the canyon. But in many places those above could not come near the brink to look over.

The approach of midday found the bruised and weary fighters struggling through one of the narrowest reaches of the canyon. The precipices jutted out so far that the lower depths seemed more cavern than chasm, and the river swirled deep and swift between sheer, narrow walls. Twice Ashton was swept past what should have been the next turning-point, and Blake, unable to see the figures on the rod, had to guess at his readings.

At last the precipices swung apart and showed the sky at a twist in the canyon's course that was the sharpest of all the turns the explorers had as yet encountered. As Blake came wading down past Ashton, along the inner curve of the bend, he stopped and pointed skywards. Ashton raised his drooping head and peered up at the rim of the opposite wall. From the brink a dense column of green-wood smoke was rising into the indigo sky.

"One more set-up," shouted Blake.

Three minutes later he took a reading on the water and on a point of rock at the angle of the canyon-side around which the river swung in its sharp curve. Three more minutes, and the two battered fighters stood together on the last bench of that tremendous line of levels, with torn and rent clothing, sodden, gaping boots, bodies bruised from head to foot—bleeding, weary, but victorious! They had finished the work that Blake had set out to do.

He held up the now-soaked notebook for Ashton to see the last penciled elevation on the wet paper.

"Two thousand, forty-five!" he shouted. "Over five hundred feet above that bench in Dry Greek Gulch! Water, electricity!—Dry Mesa shall be a garden!"

Ashton stared moodily into the exultant face of the engineer.

"Are you sure of that?" he asked. "How do you know that God will let you climb up out of this hell of stone and water?"

"There's the saying, 'God helps those who help themselves,'" replied Blake. "I'm going to put up the best fight I can. If that doesn't win out, I shall at least have the satisfaction of not having quit. If you wish to pray, do so. The sooner we start the better. From now on, the water will be rising."

"I prayed last night," said Ashton. He added somberly, "And now we are both going to the devil."

"No," said Blake, with no less earnestness. "There is no devil—there is no room for a devil in all the universe. What man calls evil is ignorance,—his ignorance of those primeval forces of nature which he has yet to chain; his ignorance of those higher qualities in his own nature which, if known, would prevent him from wronging others and would enable him to bring happiness to himself and others."

"You say that!" cried Ashton. "You can mock! You do not believe in hell!"

Blake smiled grimly. "What do you call this?—But you mean a hell hereafter. I believe this: If, when we pass into the Unknown, we continue to exist as individual consciousnesses, then we carry with us the heaven and the hell that we have each upbuilt for ourselves."

"God will not let you escape," stated Ashton. "You will pass from this hell of water into the hell of fire and brimstone."

"Have it your own way," said Blake. "I lived one summer in Death Valley. The other place can't be much hotter."

He climbed up the ledges and planted the level firmly on its tripod above the high-water mark of the spring floods. He called down to Ashton: "Hate to leave the old monkey up here; but it will serve as a memento of our present visit, when we come down again to locate the tunnel head."

"How can it be that we shall ever come down again?" replied Ashton. "It is impossible—for we shall never go up."

Blake jumped down the ledges to him and pointed to the column of smoke on the lofty heights.

"Look there," he said. "That is where we are going, if there is any possible way to go. An optimist would stand here and wait, certain that wings would soon sprout for him to fly up; a pessimist would sit down and quit. An optimist is a fool; a pessimist is a worse fool."

"And which are you?" asked Ashton.

"I am neither. I am a meliorist. I am going to face the facts, and then fight for all I'm worth. What's more, you're going to do the same. Come! We've still got some clothes left, the rod for you to use as a staff, this rope, the revolver, and seventeen cartridges. It's fortunate we have any. We've got to signal that we are going on down the canyon, instead of back up."

"We may as well stay and die here. But since you prefer to keep moving, I have no objections," said Ashton, with ironical politeness.

Blake promptly stepped into the water and led the way to the next shelf of rock. Here he fired a shot. Going a few yards farther along the rocks, he fired again. Three times he fired, at intervals of two minutes. Then the white dot of the flag appeared on the precipice brink directly up across from him.

"Once more, and we're sure they understand," he said.

Advancing a full hundred yards on down the canyon, he fired the fourth shot. Very soon the fleck of white flaunted on the rim a little way beyond them.

"They understand!" cried Blake. "Trust Jenny to use her head! Now catch your breath and tighten up. We're going to move!"

He started, and Ashton followed close behind. It was the same rough, fierce game of leaping, crawling, wading, swimming,—battling with the river, the rocks, the ledges. But now they were no longer checked and halted by the alternate stoppings for set-ups and turning-points, and no longer was Blake encumbered with the care of the level. There was nothing now to hinder or delay them except the natural obstacles of their wild path down the bed of the torrent.

Blake could give all his thought to picking the best and quickest way through rapids and falls, over the water-washed rocks and along the side ledges. And he could give all his great strength to helping his companion past the hard places. In return Ashton gave such help as he could to the engineer, many times when a steadying hand or the outstretched rod rendered easier a descent or the fording of some swift mill race in the stream.

At the end of the first quarter-mile Blake had fired a shot, and again at the second quarter. After that he waited longer intervals. He considered it advisable to husband the few remaining cartridges.

The river was now rapidly rising. But every inch of added depth found the two fugitives much farther down the canyon. In two hours they advanced thrice the distance that they had covered in the same time before noon, and this despite the increasing depth and force of the river.

The pace was so hot that Ashton was beginning to stumble and slip, but Blake kept by him and helped him along by word and deed. He asserted and repeated a dozen times over, that they were nearing the place where an ascent of the precipices might be possible. At last they rounded a turn in the winding chasm, and Blake was able to point to a break in the sheer wall on the Dry Mesa side, where the precipices were set back one above the other in a Cyclopean stepladder and their steeply-pitched faces were rough with crevices and shelves.

"Look!" he cried. "There's the place—there's our ladder up from hell to heaven!"

Ashton soon lowered his weary head. He stared dully downstream to where a fifty-foot cliff extended across from side to side of the canyon like a dam.

"Part of the wall slid in," he stated with the simplicity of one who is nearing exhaustion.

"That shall be our bridge to the ladder," shouted Blake. "It's all sheer cliff along here at the foot of the break, but the ledges run down sideways to the top of the cross cliff. We shall soon be lying up there, high and dry, getting our second wind for the run up the ladder."

The engineer spoke confidently, and felt what he spoke. But as they struggled on down the turbulent stream to the cross cliff, the light left his face. From wall to wall of the canyon the great mass of fallen rock stretched across the bottom in a sheer-faced barrier, broken only by a tunnel barely large enough to suck in the swelling volume of the river.

Blake came down close to the intake, scanning every foot of the cliff face for a scalable break or crevice. There was none to be found. He climbed along the cliff foot to a low shelf beside the roaring tunnel, and stood staring at the opening in deep thought. Even while he looked, the swelling volume of the river filled the tunnel to its roof. Blake peered at the fresh watermark twenty feet up the face of the cliff, and bent down beside Ashton, who had stretched out to rest on the shelf of rock.

"There's only one thing to it, old man," he said. "We must dive through that tunnel."

"Through that hole?" gasped Ashton. "No! I've done enough. I shall stay here."

"To drown like a rat in a rainwater barrel!" rejoined Blake. "Look at that watermark. The tunnel is now running full. Inside a quarter-hour the river will be up over this ledge. It will keep rising till it reaches that mark, and it will not fall until after low water."

"What do I care?" said Ashton hopelessly. "Go to the devil your own way. I'd rather drown here than in that underground hole. Leave me alone."

Blake considered a full half minute, looked up the cliff face, and replied: "Perhaps it's as well. I shall do the best I can. But first I want to tell you I've wiped out all that past affair. You are another person from that Lafayette Ashton. We stand here almost face to face with the Unknown. One or both of us may soon go out into the Darkness. As we may never meet again, I wish to tell you that you have proved yourself, even more than I hoped when I saw you come rushing down the ravine to join me. You have proved yourself a man. Good-by."

He held out his hand. But Ashton turned his face to the wall of rock and was silent. After a time he heard the sound of Blake's worn heels on the outer end of the shelf. His ears, attuned to the ceaseless tumult of the waters, caught the click of the protruded heel-nail heads. There was a brief pause—then the plunge. He looked about quickly and saw Blake's hands vanish in the down-sucking eddy where the swollen waters drew into the now hidden intake of the tunnel.

A cry of horror burst from his heaving chest. Blake had gone—Blake the iron-limbed, iron-hearted man. He had conquered the river—and now the wild waters had seized him and were mauling and smashing and crushing him in the terrible mill of the cavern. Beyond that underground passage, it might be miles away, the victor would fling up on some fanged rock a shapeless mass that once had been a man.



CHAPTER XXVIII

LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

Ashton again turned his face to the rock and groaned. God had answered his prayer. Now must he pay the price. If only he could force himself to lie still while the rising waters brimmed up over the ledge and up over his head and face. He was tired—tired! It would be so peaceful to lie and rest under the quiet waters.

But the first ripple that crept over the surface of the shelf brought him to his feet with the chill of its icy touch. He climbed to a shelf higher up and again stretched himself full length on the rock. To lie still and rest was heavenly.... It was too good to last. The water crept after him up the ledge. This time he could climb no higher.

He sat erect and waited, still resting, until the flood rose to his chin. Then he stood up, leaning on the battered level rod. The water rose after him, creeping with relentless stealth from his thigh to his waist, from his waist to his chest. It would soon be lapping at his throat, and then—he must begin to swim. Life was far stronger within him than he had thought. His strength had come back. Blake was right. A man should fight. He should hold fast to hope, and fight to the very last.

Something swept from side to side along the face of the cliff above him. It tapped the rock close over his head. He looked up and saw a rope. He could not see over the rounded brink of the cliff, but he had no need. There was a rescuer above him who knew his desperate situation. Could it be Blake? Surely not! He must have perished in the frightful vortex of the tunnel.

The rope swung lower. Now it was within reach. Ashton made a clutch as it swept over him and caught its end. He gave a tug. At once the line slackened down to him. He felt something in his palm, twisted between the rope strands. He looked and saw that it was a piece of folded paper. He opened it and found written a terse sentence in Blake's bold clear hand:

Tie rod to line and climb.

Why should he tie the splintered level rod to the rope? Of what possible use could it be in climbing the precipices? But even while Ashton asked himself the questions he obeyed Blake's directions. The water lapped up over his chin as he tied the knot. He pulled heavily on the rope. It gave a little way, and then tautened. He reached up and began to climb, hand over hand, with desperate speed.



Thirty feet above the water his strength was almost outspent, but he struggled to raise himself one more time, and then another. To pause meant to slip back and perish. Another upward heave. The rope here bent in over the rounding cliff. Hardly could he force his fingers between it and the rock. Yet if only he could get his knee up on the sharp slope! He heaved again, his face purple with exertion, the veins swelling out on his forehead as if about to burst.

At last! his knee was up and braced against the rock. Another desperate clutch at the rope—another heave—still another. The cliff edge was rounding back. Every upward hitch was easier than the one before. Now he was scrambling up on toes and knees; now he could rise to his feet.

The line led across a waterworn ledge and downward. Ashton peered over, and saw the senseless body of Blake wedged against the other side of the ledge. About it, close below the arms, the line was knotted fast.

Ashton stared wonderingly at the still, white face of the unconscious man. It was covered with cold sweat. A peculiar twist in the sprawling left leg caught his attention. He looked—and understood. Panting with exertion, he staggered down the ledges of the lower side of the barrier to where the river burst furiously out of the mouth of the tunnel.

Hurled by that mad torrent from the darkness of the gorged cavern straight upon a line of rocks, all Blake's strength and quickness had not enabled him to save himself from injury. Yet he had crept up those rough ledges, dragging his shattered leg. Atrocious as must have been his agony, he had crept all the way to the top, had written the note, and flung down the rope to rescue his companion.

There was no vessel in which Ashton could carry water. He had no hat, his boots were full of holes, he must use his hands in scrambling back up the ledges. He stripped off his tattered flannel shirt, dipped it in a swirling eddy, and started back as fast as he could climb.

Blake still lay unconscious. Ashton straightened out the twisted leg, and knelt to bathe the big white face with an end of the dripping garment. After a time the eyelids of the prostrate man fluttered and lifted, and the pale blue eyes stared upward with returning consciousness.

"I'm here!" cried Ashton. "Do you see? You saved me!"

"Colt's gone," muttered Blake. "But cartridges—fire."

"You mean, fire the cartridges to let them know where we are? How can I do it without the revolver?"

"No, build a fire," replied the engineer. He raised a heavy hand to point towards the high end of the barrier. "Driftwood up there. Bring it down. I'll light it."

"Light it—how?" asked Ashton incredulously.

"Get it," ordered Blake.

Ashton hurried across the crest of the barrier to where it sloped up and merged in the precipice foot. The mass of rock that formed the barrier had fallen out of the face of the lower part of the canyon wall, leaving a great hollow in the rock. But above the hollow the upper precipices beetled out and rose sheer, on up the dizzy heights to the verge of the chasm. Contrasted with this awesome undermined wall, the broken, steeple-sloped precipices adjoining it on the upstream side looked hopefully scalable to Ashton. He marked out a line of shelves and crevices running far up to where the full sunlight smiled on the rock.

But Blake had told him to fetch wood for a fire, that they might signal the watchers on the heights. He hastened up over the rocks to the heaps of logs and branches stranded on the high end of the barrier by the freshets. Every year the river, swollen by the spring rains, brimmed over the top of this natural dam.

Yet not all the heaps lying on the ledges were driftwood. As Ashton approached, he was horrified to see that the largest and highest situated piles were nothing else than masses of bones. Drawn by a gruesome fascination, he climbed up to the nearest of the ghastly heaps. The loose ribs and vertebrae scattered down the slope seemed to him the size of human ribs and vertebrae. He shuddered as they crunched under his tread.

Then he saw a skull with spiral-curved horns. He looked up the canyon wall, and understood. The high-heaped bones were the skeletons of sheep. In a flash, he remembered Isobel's account of Gowan, that first day up there on the top of the mesa. Not only had the puncher killed six men; he had, together with other violent men of the cattle ranges, driven thousands of sheep over into the canyon—and this was the place.

Sick with horror and loathing, Ashton ran to snatch up an armful of the smaller driftwood and hurry back down to the center of the barrier. He found Blake lying white and still. But beside him were three cartridges from which the bullets had been worked out. At the terse command of the engineer, Ashton ground one of the older and drier pieces of wood to minute fragments on a rock.

Blake emptied the powder from one of the cartridges into the little pile of splinters, and holding the edge of another shell against a corner of the rock, tapped the cap with a stone. At the fifth stroke the cap exploded. The loosened powder of the cartridge flared out into the powder-sprinkled tinder. Soon a fire of the dry, half-rotted driftwood was blazing bright and almost smokeless in the twilight of the depths.

"Now haul up the rod," directed Blake, and he lay back to bask in the grateful warmth.

Ashton drew up the level rod and came back over the ledge. He found that the engineer had freed himself from the last coils of the rope and was unraveling the end that had been next his body. But his eyes were upturned to the heights.

"Look—the flag!" he said.

"Already?" exclaimed Ashton.

"Yes. No doubt one of them has been waiting on that out-jutting point.—Now, if you'll break the rod. We've got to get my leg into splints."

The crude splints were soon ready. For bandages there were strips from the tattered shirts of both men. Unraveled rope-strands, burnt off in the fire, served to lash all together. Beads of cold sweat gathered and rolled down Blake's white face throughout the cruel operation. Yet he endured every twist and pull of the broken limb without a groan. When at last the bones were set to his satisfaction and the leg lashed rigid to the splints, he even mustered a faint smile.

"That beats an amputation," he declared. "Now if you can help me up under the cliff, where you can plant the fire against a back-log—I want to dry out and do some planning while you're climbing up for help. I've an idea we can put in a dynamo down here, with turbines in the intake and in the mouth of the tunnel—carry a wire up over the top of the mesa and down into the gulch. Understand? All the electric power we want to drive the tunnel, and very cheap."

"My God!" gasped Ashton. "You can lie here—here—maimed, already starving—and can plan like that?"

"Why not? No fun thinking of my leg, is it? As for the rest, you're going up to report the situation. They'll soon manage to yank me out of this blessed hole."

Ashton's face darkened. "But that's the question," he rejoined. "Am I going to go up? Am I going to try to go up?"

Blake looked at him with a steady, unflinching gaze. "There's something queer about all this. Isn't it time you explained? When the rope came off that last cliff in the gorge and I saw that you had untied it before sliding down, I thought you were off your head. And two or three times today, too. But since we landed here—"

"Your broken leg," interrupted Ashton—"it made me forget. You had saved me with the rope. I had to help you. Now I see how foolish I have been. I should have left you to lie here, and flung myself back over into the water."

"Why?" calmly queried Blake.

"Why! You ask why?" cried Ashton, his eyes ablaze with excitement, his whole body quivering. "Can't you see? Are you blind? What do I care about myself if I can save her from you? I shall not try to escape. You shall never go up there to work her harm!"

"Harm her? You mean put through this irrigation project?"

"No!" shouted Ashton. "Don't lie and pretend, you hypocrite! You know what I mean! You know she could not hide how you were enticing her!"

Blake stared in utter astonishment. Then, regardless of his leg, he sat up and said quietly: "I see. I thought you must have understood when she told me, there at the last moment before we started. She is my sister."

"Sister!" scoffed Ashton. "You liar! You have no sister. Your sisters died years ago. Genevieve told me."

"That was what I told her. I believed it true. But it was not true. Belle did not die—God! when I think of that! It has helped me through this fight—it helped me crawl up here with that leg dangling. Good God! To think of Jenny waiting for me up there, and Son, and little Belle too—little Belle whom all these years I thought dead!"

Ashton stood as if turned to stone. "Belle—you call her Belle? She told me—Chuckie only a nickname!" he stammered. "Adopted—her real name Isobel!"

"We always called her Belle—Baby Belle! She was the youngest," said Blake.

"But why—why did you not—tell me?"

"I did not know. She did—she knew from the first, there at Stockchute. I see it now. Even before that, she must have guessed it. Yes, I see all now. She sent for me to come out here, because she thought I might be her brother."

"You did not tell me!" reproached Ashton, his face ghastly. "How was I to know?"

"I tell you, I did not know," repeated Blake. "At first—yes, all along—there was something about her voice and face—But she had changed so much, and all these years—eight, nine years—I had thought her dead. She gave me no sign—only that friendliness. I did not know until the very last moment, there on the edge of the ravine. I thought you saw it; that you heard her tell me. It seemed to me everybody must have heard."

"I was running away—I could not bear it. I think I must have been crazy for a time. If only I had heard! My God! if only I had heard!"

"Well, you know now," said Blake. "What's done is done. The question now is, what are you going to do next?"

Instantly Ashton's drooping figure was a-quiver with eagerness.

"You wish first to be taken up near the driftwood," he exclaimed. "Let me lift you. Don't be afraid to put your weight on me. Hurry! We must lose no time!"

Blake was already struggling up. Ashton strained to help him rise erect on his sound leg. Braced and half lifted by the younger man, the engineer hobbled and hopped along the barrier crest and up its sloping side. His trained eye picked out a great weather-seasoned pine log lying directly beneath the outermost point of the canyon rim. An object dropped over where the flag still flecked against the indigo sky, would have fallen straight down to the log, unless deflected by the prong of a ledge that jutted out twelve hundred feet from the top.

"Here," panted Blake, regardless of the great pile of skeletons heaped on the far end of the log. "This place—right below them! Go back—bring fire and rope."

Ashton ran back to fetch the rope and a dozen blazing sticks. Driftwood was strewn all around. In a minute he had a fire started against the butt end of the log. He began to gather a pile of fuel. But Blake checked him with a cheerful—"That's enough, old man. I can manage now. Take the rope, and go."

When Ashton had coiled the rope over his shoulder and under the opposite arm, he came and stood before his prostrate companion. His face was scarlet with shame.

"I have been a fool—and worse," he said. "I doubted her. I am utterly unfit to live. If I were alone down here, I would stay and rot. But you are her brother. If it is possible to get up there, I am going up."

"You are going up!" encouraged Blake. "You will make it. Give my love to them. Tell them I'm doing fine."

He held out his hand.

"No," said Ashton. "I'd give anything if I could grip hands with you. But I cannot. You are her brother. I am unfit to touch your hand."

He turned and ran up the precipice-foot to the first steep ascent of the steeple-sloped break in the wall of the abyss.



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.



CHAPTER XXX

LURKING BEASTS

The moment that he had helped haul the climber to safety Gowan had ridden away with the horses to the camp. He now came jogging back with the tent and all else that they had not been carrying with them in their skirting of the canyon edge. He unloaded the packs and hastened to pitch the tent.

As he was finishing, Isobel called to him sharply. "What are you doing there, Kid? That can wait. Come here."

"Yes, Miss Chuckie," he replied with ready obedience. But when he came down the slope to the little group, his mouth was like a thin gash across his lean jaws. He stared coldly at Ashton between narrowed lids. "Want me to help tote him up by the fire?" he asked.

"No!" she replied. "It is Tom! He is down there—his leg broken—and no food! You must go down to him."

"Go down?" queried the puncher. "What good would that do? I couldn't help him with that climb. He weighs a good two hundred."

"You can take food down to him and let him know that help is coming. You must!"

Gowan looked sullenly at the unconscious man. "Sorry, Miss Chuckie. It's no go. I ain't a mountain sheep."

"But he came up!"

"That's different. It's a sight easier going up cliffs than climbing down. No, you'll have to excuse me, Miss Chuckie."

The girl flamed with indignant anger. "You coward! You saw him come up, after all that time down in those fearful depths—after fighting his way all those miles along the terrible river—yet you dare not go down! You coward! you quitter!"

The puncher's face turned a sickly yellow, and he seemed to shrink in on himself. His voice sank to a husky whisper: "You can say that, Miss Chuckie! Any man say it, he'd be dead before now. If you want to know, I've got a mighty good reason for not wanting to go down. It ain't that I'm afraid. You can bank on that. It's something else. I'll go quick enough—but it's got to be on one condition. You've got to promise to marry me."

"Marry you?"

"Yes. You know how I've felt towards you all these years. Promise to marry me, and I'll go to hell and back for you. I'll do anything for you. I'll save him!"

"You cur! You'd force me to bargain myself to you!" she cried, fairly beside herself with righteous fury. "I thought you a man! You cur—you cowardly cur!"

Gowan turned from her and walked rapidly away along the canyon edge, his head hunched between his shoulders, his hands downstretched at his thighs, the fingers crooked convulsively.

"Oh!" gasped Genevieve. "You've driven him away! Call him back! We need him! He must go for help!"

The words shocked the girl out of her rash anger. Her flushed face whitened with fear. "Kid!" she screamed. "Come back, Kid! You must go to the ranch—bring the men!"

The cry of appeal should have brought him back to her on the run. It pierced high above the booming reverberations of the canyon. Yet he paid no heed. He neither halted nor paused nor even looked back. If anything, he hurried away faster than before.

"Kid! dear Kid! forgive me! Come back and help us!" shrieked the girl.

He kept on down along the canyon rim, his chin sunk on his breast, his downstretched hands bent like claws. She ran a little way after him; only to flutter back again, wringing her hands, distracted. "What shall we do? what shall we do?"

"Be quiet, dear—be quiet!" urged Genevieve. "You've driven him away. We must do the best we can. You must go yourself. I can stay and watch—"

"No, no!" cried Isobel. "The way he looked at Lafe!—I dare not go! He may come back—and I not here!"

She knelt to place her trembling hand on Ashton's forehead.

Genevieve looked at the setting sun. "There is no time to lose," she said. "Saddle my horse while I nurse Baby. I cannot take him with me down the mountain, in the dark."

"Genevieve! You dare go—at night?"

"Someone must bring help, else Tom—all alone down in that dreadful chasm—!"

"But you may lose the way! I will go!"

"No, no, you must stay, Belle. I saw his eyes. He may come back. I could not protect Lafayette, but you—There is no other way. I must leave Baby, and go."

Wondering at the courage of the young mother, Isobel ran to saddle the oldest of the picketed horses. He was the slowest of them all, but he was surefooted and steady and very wise. When she brought him down the ridge, Genevieve placed the newly fed baby in her arms and went with the glasses to peer down the sheer precipices. There in the blackness so far beneath her the glowing fire illuminated an outstretched form. It was her husband, lying flat on his back and gazing up at the heights. Almost she could fancy that he saw her as she saw him.

But she did not linger. Time was too precious. She dropped him a kiss, and ran to spring upon the waiting pony. She did not pause even to kiss the big-eyed baby. The thirsty pony needed no urging to start at a lively jog up the slope of the first ridge. As he topped the crest and broke into a lope the sun dipped below the western edge of High Mesa. A few seconds later horse and rider disappeared from Isobel's anxious gaze down the far side of the ridge.

"Old Buck knows the trail," murmured the girl. "He knows he is headed for the waterhole. Yet if—if he should lose the trail!"

A spasm of fear sent her hand to the pistol hilt under the fold of her skirt and twisted her head about. She glared along the canyon rim. Gowan was still striding away from her. She watched him fixedly, her hand clutched fast on the hilt of her pistol, until he disappeared around a mass of rocks.

The whinnying of the horses after their companion at last drew her attention. They had not been watered since the previous evening. Cuddling close the frightened baby, the girl fetched a basin and one of the water cans, to sponge out the dusty nostrils of the animals and give each two or three swallows.

Then, when she had soothed the fretful child to sleep, she laid him in a snug nest of blankets between a rock and a fallen tree, and went to watch beside Ashton. He lay as she had left him, in a stupor of sleep and exhaustion.

Gradually the twilight faded. Stars began to twinkle in the cloudless sky. She watched and waited while the dusk deepened. When she could barely see objects a few yards away, she stooped over the unconscious man and, putting out all her supple young strength, half dragged, half carried him up the slope to a hiding place that she had chosen, in under an overhanging ledge. There she spread pine needles and blankets on the soft mold and lifted him upon them, so that nothing hard should press against his wounds.

The fire had burned low. It was a full hundred yards away from the hiding place. She went to replenish it and take a hasty look down at that outstretched form in the depths. But soon she stole back to the sleeping man under the rock, going, as she had come, by a roundabout way in the darkness.

Night settled down close and dense over the plateau. The girl crouched beside the sleeper, her eyes peering out into the blackness, the drawn pistol ready in her hand. She could see only a few feet in the dim starlight. But her ears, accustomed to the dull monotone of the booming canyon, heard every sound—the click of the horses' hoofs, even the munching of the nearest one, the hoot of the owls that flitted overhead, the distant yelps and wails of coyotes.

An hour passed, two hours—a third. She crept around to replenish the fire. When she returned she heard the baby fretting. Swiftly she groped her way to him and carried him to the hiding place, to quiet his outcry. He sucked in a little of the beaten egg and cream that she had ready for Ashton. It satisfied his hunger, and he fell asleep, clasped against her soft warm bosom. She crouched down with him in her lap, her right hand again clasped on the pistol hilt, ready for the expected attack.

She waited as before, silent, motionless, every sense alert. Another hour dragged by, and another. Midnight passed. Suddenly, on the ridge slope above her, one of the horses snorted and plunged. She raised the pistol. The horse became quiet. But something came gliding around the rocks, a low form vaguely outlined in the darkness. It might have been a creeping man. It turned towards the hiding place. The girl found herself looking into a pair of glaring eyes. She thrust out the pistol, with her forefinger pointing along the barrel. The darkness was too deep for her to aim by the sights.

Before she could press the trigger, the beast bounded away, with a snarl far deeper, far more ferocious than any coyote could have uttered. The girl did not fire. The wolf had seen the glint of her pistol barrel and had fled. He would not return. But she shuddered and drew the sleeping baby close as she thought of what might have happened had she left him alone in the nest between the rock and the tree.

The precious, helpless child! He was of her own blood, the son of her strong, splendid brother ... of her brother, lying down there in those awful depths, helpless—in agony!...



CHAPTER XXXI

CONFESSIONS

A groping hand touched her arm; bandaged fingers sought to feel who she was. Behind her sounded a drowsy incoherent murmur. The snarl of the wolf had roused the sleeper from his torpor.

"Hush—hush!" she whispered. "It is all well. I am here by you. Lie still."

"Isobel!" he murmured. "Isobel!"

"Yes, dear!" she soothed. "I am here. Rest—go to sleep again. All is well."

"All is—?" He roused a little more. "You say—Then he is safe! They have brought him up—out of that hell!"

She could not lie outright. "He will soon be safe. By morning help will have come to us. As soon as the men can see to go down, they will descend for him. They will bring him up the way that you have shown us!"

Her voice quivered with pride of what he had done. She drew up his hand and pressed her lips tenderly upon the bandages.

Had the caress been a burn, he could not have more quickly snatched the hand away. He sought to rise, and struck his head against the overhanging rock.

"Where am I? Let me out!" he said.

"No, you must not! Lie still! You must not!" she remonstrated.

"Lie still?" he repeated. "Lie still! with him down there—alone!"

"But it is night—midnight. It will be hours before even the moon rises."

"And he down there—alone! Help me make ready. I am going down to him."

"Going down? But you cannot! It is midnight!"

"There is a lantern. I shall take that. It will be easier than in the daytime, for I shall not see those sickening precipices below."

He sought to creep out past her. She clutched his arm.

"No, no! do not go! There is no need! Wait until they come. You have done your share—far more than your share! Wait!"

"I cannot," he replied. "I must go down to him. I have no right to be up here, and he still down there."

"You must!" she urged, clinging tighter to his arm. "You may fall. I am afraid! I cannot bear it! Do not go! Stay with me—say that you will stay with me—dearest!"

"Good God!" he cried, tearing himself away from her, "To let you say it—say it to me!"

"Dearest!" she repeated. "Dearest, do not go! There is no need! I cannot bear it! Do not go!"

"No need? My God! When I could fling myself over, if it were not for him! To have let you say it—to me—to a liar! thief! murderer!"

"Dearest!" she whispered. "Hush! You are delirious—you do not know—"

"It is you who do not know!" he cried. "But you shall—everything—all my cowardly baseness!" The confession burst from him in a torrent of self-denunciation—"That trip to town, when we went to fetch them, I lied to you about those bridge plans. It was not true that I found them. He handed them to me. He took no receipt. I looked at them and saw how wonderful they were. I stole them. My father had threatened to cast me off if I did not do something worth while. I was desperate. So I stole your brother's plans. I copied them—"

"You know about Tom!" she interrupted. "But of course. You saw me tell him, there at the ravine."

"I saw you put your arms about his neck and kiss him; but I did not hear—I did not see the truth. I believed—that is the worst of it all—I believed it possible that you—you—!... That devil Gowan.... But that is no excuse. Had I not already doubted you.... And I went down—down into hell, with only one purpose—to make certain that he never should come up again!"

"Dear Christ!" whispered the girl—"Dear Christ! He has gone mad!"

"No, Isobel," he said, his voice slow and dead with the calm of utter despair, "I am not mad. I have never been mad except for a little while after you put your arms about his neck. No—For years I was a fool, a profligate fool, wasting my life as I wasted all those thousands of dollars that I had not earned. I turned thief—a despicable sneak thief. At last the dirty crime found me out. I received a small share of the punishment that I deserved. Then you took me in—without question—treated me as a man. God knows I tried to be one!"

"You were!—you are!" she broke in. "This is all a mistake—a cruel, hideous mistake!"

"I tried to go," he went on unflinchingly. "You urged me to stay. I was weak. I could not force myself to leave you."

"Because—because!" she murmured.

"All the more reason why I should have gone," he replied. "But I was weak, unfit. I lied to you and won your pity. You gave me the chance to stay and prove myself what I am. Down there, when he told me what I should have guessed—what I must have guessed had not my own baseness blinded me to the truth—when he told me he was your brother, I saw myself, my real self,—my shriveled, black, hellish soul. Now you see why I must go down again. I can never make reparation for what I have done. But I can at least go down to him."

"You take all the blame on yourself!" she protested. "What if I had confessed my secret, there at the first, when Tom sprang down from the car and I knew him."

"If you had told, then I should not have been tempted to doubt you, and I should have gone on, it might have been forever, with that lie and that theft between us—and I should not have been forced to see, as I now see, my absolute unworthiness of you."

"Of me!" she cried shrilly, and she burst into wild hysterical laughter. It broke off as abruptly as it began. "Unworthy of me—of me? the daughter of a drunken mother, the sister of a girl who—" A sob choked her. She went on desperately: "You have told me all. But I—do you not wonder why I kept silent—why I denied Mary by my silence? You say you sought to harm Tom—down there. You did not know he was my brother. You thought he would harm me. Is it not so?"

"I doubted you!"

"Why? Because I failed to tell the truth. I feared to hurt him—to make trouble between him and his rich, high-bred wife. As if I should not have known better the moment I saw Genevieve! Dear sister! she knows all. But you—Either I should have spoken, or I should have hidden all my fondness for him. But I could not hide my love for him—and I was ashamed to tell."

"Ashamed—you?"

"We lived in the slums. They told me my father was a big man, a man such as Tom is now. He was a railroad engineer. He was killed when I was a baby. Then we sank into the slums. My mother—she died when I was twelve. There was then only Mary and I and Tom. He could make only a little, working at odd jobs. Mary and I worked in a factory. Even she was under age. When I was going on fourteen there came a terrible winter when thousands were out of work. We almost starved."

"You—starved!" murmured Ashton. "Starved! And I was starting in at college, flinging away money!"

"Tom tried to force people to let him work," the girl went on drearily. "He was violent. They put him in jail. Soon Mary and I had nothing left. There was no work for us. We had sold everything that anyone would buy. The rent was overdue. They turned us out—on the streets.... I was too young; but Mary.... She found a place where I could stay. They were decent people, but hard....

"The weather was bitterly cold. She was taken sick. When the people with whom I was staying heard what she had done, they refused to help. I begged in the street. I was very small and thin. The—the beasts did not trouble me. Then, when Mary was very sick, I met Daddy. I begged from him. He did not give me a nickel and pass on. He stopped and made me talk—he made me take him to Mary.

"He had her moved to the best hospital.... It was too late.... I also had pneumonia. They said I would die. But Daddy brought me home just as soon as I could be moved. The railroad was then a hundred miles from Dry Mesa. But he kept me wrapped in furs, and all the way he carried me in his arms. Do you wonder why I love him so?... That is all. You see now why I shrank from telling—why I denied Mary."

"She is in Heaven," said Ashton—"in Heaven, where some day you will go. But I—I—" She could see no more than the vague blotch of his white face in the darkness, but his voice told her the anguish of his look. "He was right—your brother. He told me that we always take with us the heaven or the hell that we each have made for ourselves.... I have lost you.... You know now why I am going down to do the little that I can do."

"You are going down?" she asked wonderingly. "You still say that you are going down? Yet I have told you about—Mary!"

"If you were she, I still would be utterly unfit to look you in the face. I shall go to the camp for the lantern. There were other gloves and some of my clothing."

"They are all here."

"Show me where they are, and get ready the lantern and bandages and a sack of food."

"You are going down," she acquiesced. "You are going to Tom. And you are coming up with him—to me!"

"That is too much. I doubted you. Where are those things? He is waiting down there alone."

"Here is his child, my nephew," she said. "Hold him while I go for what you need. Here is my pistol. The man who shot you, who twice tried to murder you—he is somewhere up here. He will not harm me. But you—If he comes creeping in on you here, shoot him as you would shoot a coyote."

"The man who shot me? He is up here?"

"You have seen him every day since that first day I met you," replied the girl. "His name is Gowan."

"Gowan?"

"Kid Gowan, murderer! I saw his eyes as he looked at you, lying down there on the brink. Then I knew."

"But—if he—Where is Genevieve? I cannot go and leave you alone."

"You can—you must! He is a coward. He dare not follow you down that terrible place. No harm will come to me if you are gone. But if he comes back and finds you—do you not see that if he kills you, he must also kill me? But in the morning, when the others come—Oh, why hasn't Daddy come? All this long time since you went down into the depths, and he not with us! If only he were here!"

"Genevieve?" again inquired Ashton.

"She has gone. She started down the mountain for help when Kid went away. I'm so afraid for you, dear! He may be creeping back now—he may be waiting already, close by here, in the darkness. But if he has not heard our voices, he will go first to where you came up, and then to the tent. Keep quiet until I return. Wait; here is cream and egg. Drink it all."

When he had drained the bowl that she held to his lips, she crept away. Ashton sat still, the warm, soft little body of the sleeping baby in his arms, the pistol in his bandaged right hand. In her excitement Isobel had forgotten his bound fingers. If Gowan had come on him then, he would have put the baby back in under the rock, and faced the puncher's revolver with a smile. What had he now to live for? He had lost her. She had not yet grasped the baseness of what he had thought and done. As soon as she realized ... And he could never forgive himself.



CHAPTER XXXII

OVER THE BRINK

Isobel came back to him, noiselessly gliding around through the darkness. She set down the bundle she was carrying, and hung blankets over the entrance of the little cave. She then lighted the lantern. He held out his bound hands. She unbound them enough for him to use his fingers, and taking the baby and the pistol, crouched down, with her ear close to the screening blankets, while he exchanged his tattered clothes for those she had brought to him.

There were also his change of boots and a pair of Blake's gauntlet gloves, into which he was able to force his slender fingers without removing the remaining bandages. Isobel had already bound up into a kind of knapsack the food and clothing and first-aid package that he was to take down to her injured brother. He slung it upon his back, and whispered that he was ready.

She nestled the baby in the warm blankets on which he had lain, wrapped a blanket about the lantern, and led him cautiously down to the brink of the chasm. Dark as was the night about them, it was bright compared with the intense blackness of that profound abyss. The girl caught his arm and shrank back from the edge.

"You will not fall? you are certain you will not fall?" she whispered.

"I cannot fall," he answered with calm conviction. "He needs me. I am going down to him. Besides, it will be easier with the lantern than if I could see below."

"Do not uncover the light until you are down over the edge.—Wait!"

She stooped to knot the rope that he had brought up from the depths, to the lariats with which he had been dragged up the last ledges. She looped the end about his waist.

"There," she said. "I shall at least be able to help you down the first fifty yards."

"God bless you and keep you! Good-by!" he murmured in a choking voice, and he hastily crept down to slip over the first ledge of that night-shrouded Cyclopean ladder.

"Lafe!" she whispered. "Surely you do not mean to go without first telling me—I cannot let you go until—If you should fall! Wait, dearest! Kiss me—tell me that you—Oh, if you should fall!"

"I will not fall; I cannot. Good-by!"

The dim white blotch of his face disappeared below the verge. The line jerked through the girl's hands. She clutched it with frantic strength and flung herself back with her feet braced against a point of rock. After a moment of tense straining, the rope slackened, and his voice came up to her over the ledge: "Pay out, please. It's all right. I've found a crevice."

She eased off on the line a few inches at a time, but always keeping it taut and always holding herself braced for a sudden jerk. At last the end came into her hand. She had to lie out on the rim-rock and call down to him. He called back in a tone of quiet assurance. The line slackened. He had cast it loose. The lantern glowed out in the blackness and showed him standing on a narrow shelf.

As Isobel bent lower to gaze at him, a frightful scream rang out above the booming of the canyon. It was a shriek such as a woman would utter in mortal fear. The girl drew back from the verge, her hair stiffening with horror. Could it be possible that Genevieve had lost her way and was wandering back to camp, and that Gowan—

Again the fearful scream pierced the air. Isobel looked quickly across towards the far side of the canyon. She could see nothing, but she drew in a deep sigh of relief. The second cry had told her that it was only a mountain lion, over on the other brink of the chasm.

When she again looked down at Ashton he was descending a crevice with a rapidity that brought her heart into her mouth. Yet there was no hurry in his quick movements, and every little while he paused on a shelf to peer at the steep slope immediately below him. Soon the circle of lantern light became smaller and dimmer to the anxious watcher above. Steadily it waned until all she could see was a little point of light far down in the darkness—and always it grew smaller and fainter.

Lying there with her bosom pressed against the hard stone, her straining eyes fixed on that lessening point of light, she had lost all count of time. Her whole soul was in her eyes, watching, watching, watching lest that tiny light should suddenly shoot down like a meteor and vanish in the darkness. Many times it disappeared, but never in swift downward flight, and always it reappeared.

Not until the moon came gliding up above the lofty white crests of the snowy range did she think of aught else than that speck of light and of him who was bearing it down into the black depths. But the glint of moonlight on a crystalline stone broke her steadfast gaze. Before she could again fix it on the faint point of lantern light a sound that had been knocking at the threshold of her consciousness at last made itself heard. It was an intermittent clinking as of steel on stone.

She looked around, thinking that one of the horses was walking along the ridge slope with a loose shoe. But all were standing motionless in the moonlight, dozing. Again she heard the click, and this time she located the direction from which it came. She looked at the split rock on the edge of the sheer drop. From beside it she had peered down through the field glasses at the outstretched form of her brother, far beneath in the canyon bottom.

The sound came from that rock. She stared at the side of the frost-split fragment with dilated eyes. The crack between the loose outer bowlder and the main mass showed very black and wide in the moonlight. Could it be possible that it had widened—that it was slipping over? And her brother down there beneath it!...

* * * * *

By setting wedge-shaped stones in the top of the cleft rock and prying with the crowbar, Gowan had gradually canted the top of the loose outer bowlder towards the edge of the precipice. It had only to topple forward in order to plunge down the canyon wall. He was working as silently as he could, but with a fierce eagerness that caused an occasional slip of the crowbar on the rock.

Although the great block of stone weighed over two tons, its base was small and rounded, and the mass behind it gave him leverage for his bar. Every inch that he pried it forward, the stones slipped farther down into the widening crack and held the vantage he had gained. Already the bowlder had been pushed out at the top many inches. It was almost balanced. The time had come to see if he could not pry it over with a single heave.

He did not propose to fall over after the rock. He turned his face to the brink, set the end of the bar in the crevice, and braced himself to heave backwards on the outer end. He put his weight on it and pulled. He could feel the rock give—the top was moving outward. A little more, and it must topple over.

Close behind him spoke a voice so hoarse and low-pitched with horror that it sounded like a man's—"Drop that bar! drop it!"

With the swiftness of a wolf, he bounded sideways along the rim-rock. In the same lightning movement, he whirled face about and whipped his Colt's from its holster. His finger was crooking against the trigger before he saw who it was that confronted him. The hammer fell in the same instant that he twitched the muzzle up and sideways. The heavy bullet scorched the girl's cheek.

Above the crashing report rose a wild cry, "Miss Chuckie—God!"

Through the blinding, stinging powder-smoke she saw him stagger backwards as if to flee from what he thought he had done. His foot went down over the sharp edge. He flung up his hands and dropped into the abyss.

She did not shriek. She could not. Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. Her heart stopped beating. She crumpled down and lay gasping. But the fascination of horror spurred her to struggle to her knees and creep over to peer down from the place where he had fallen.

Beneath her was only blank, utter darkness. No sound came up out of the deep except only that ceaseless reverberation of the hidden river. Twelve hundred feet down, the falling man had struck glancingly upon the smooth side of an out-jutting rock and his crushed body had been flung far out and sideways. It plunged into the rapids below the barrier and was borne away down the canyon. But this the girl could not have seen even in midday.

She looked for the red star of the distant fire where she knew her brother was lying. She could not see it. The point upon which the falling man had struck shut off her view. The other side of the split rock was where she and Genevieve had looked down through the glasses and seen Blake. She failed to realize the difference in the change of position. Her horror deepened. She thought that Gowan had hurled straight down to the bottom with all the terrific velocity of that sheer drop, and that he had plunged upon the fire and upon the dear form outstretched beside it, to crush and mangle and be crushed and mangled. The thought was too frightful for human endurance.

A long time she lay in a swoon, her head on the very edge of the brink. It was the wailing of the hungry, frightened baby that at last called her back to life and action. She dragged herself up around to the hiding place. The neglected baby was not easy to quiet. The cream had soured. There was nothing that she could give him except water. All the eggs that were left she had put in the knapsack that Ashton was carrying down to her brother. The baby now showed the full reflex of his mother's long hours of anxiety and fear. He fretted and cried and would not be comforted.

The chill of approaching dawn forced her to rebuild the outburnt fire. The warm glow and the play of the flames diverted the child and hushed his outcry. Holding him so that he might continue to watch the dancing tongues of fire, the girl sat motionless, going over and over again in her mind all that had occurred since the tattered, bleeding, purple-faced climber had come straining up out of the depths.... It could not have happened—it was all a hideous dream.... Would they never come? Must she sit here forever—alone!



CHAPTER XXXIII

FRIENDS IN NEED

Because of the moonlight she did not heed the graying of the east. But the whinnying of the picketed horses roused her from the apathy of misery into which she had sunk. She stood up and looked along the ridge. A small roundish object appeared above the crest—then others. They rose quickly—the heads of riders spurring their horses up the far side of the ridge.

Singly, in pairs, in groups, the rescuers burst up into view and came loping down to her, shouting and waving. In the lead rode her father and the sheriff; in the midst Genevieve, between two attendant young punchers. In all, there were nearly two dozen eager, resolute men, everyone an admiring friend of Miss Chuckie, everyone zealous to serve her and hers.

The girl stood waiting beside the fire. She had tried to run to meet them and found that she could not move. The suddenness of their coming after all that fearful night of waiting seemed to numb her limbs.

They rushed down upon her, waving, shouting questions. Her father, on Rocket, was the first to reach her. He sprang off and ran to put his arm about her quivering shoulders.

"Honey! it's all right now!" he assured her. "We're here with everything that's needed. We'll soon yank him up out of that hole!"

The baby, frightened by the rush and tumult of the off-leaping riders, began to scream. Someone took him from the girl's arms and handed him to his mother as she was lifted down out of her saddle. Isobel pressed her face against her father's sweaty breast.

"Hold on, Miss Chuckie!" sang out one of the men. "Don't let go yet. Where's Gowan—Kid Gowan?"

She shuddered convulsively, yet managed to reply: "He—was trying to—to roll the rock down. Tom, my brother, is right below it. I heard and came to see. His back was to me. I could not shoot—I could not raise my pistol. When I spoke, he whirled and shot at me. He—"

"Kid—shot at you?" cried Knowles. "At you? 'Tain't possible!"

"He didn't mean to. He fired before he saw who I was. Then he saw. He forgot everything—everything except that he had shot at me. He backed off—there—over the edge!"

A sudden hush fell on the excited crowd. One man went to peer down from the place to which the girl had pointed. He came back softly. "Same place where the last bunch of sheep went over," he said. "Rest of us were pretty sick—ready to quit. He kept after them until the last ewe jumped. Said they'd gone to hell, where they belonged."

"He's the one that's gone there!" said the sheriff. "Look at the way this bowlder is pried loose, ready to roll over! Once heard tell that his real dad was Billie the Kid. Some of you mayn't have heard tell of Billie. He was the coldest blooded, promiscuous murderer of them days when we used to drive from Texas to Montana and the boys used to shoot-up towns and each other just for fun. Well, this Kid Gowan has got Billie's eyes and slit mouth. Can't say I ever took to him, but seeing as how he was a crack-up puncher and Wes Knowles' foreman—"

"That's it! I can't understand it—Kid has been almost like a son to me all these years!" complained Knowles perplexedly. He explained to his daughter. "You're wondering why I didn't come sooner, honey. Those Utes had been let go. We had to follow them up a long ways. When we got them back and put them on that trail from the waterhole, they found it led straight across the flats to where the horses and wagon had stood. There the tracks of the Indian shoes ended, and the tracks of shod hoofs led off into the brush. We followed them all the way 'round to the lower waterhole and up the lower creek to the ranch, and there they took us right to Rocket's heels. The Jap said Kid had his saddle in the wagon when he came back from town, and he had a new hat. Mr. Blake did some hot shooting at that assassin on the hill. So, putting two and two together—"

"Oh, Daddy, I know—I knew when I saw him look at Lafe!"

"The—" Knowles choked back the epithet. "Yes, Mrs. Blake told us about that—and about her husband! Jumping Jehosaphat! Think of his being your brother! You must have been plumb locoed, to keep still about that! Why didn't you tell us, honey?—leastways me, your Daddy!"

"I—I—But about Genevieve? Tell me. You could have come sooner if she—Was she lost? I was sure that pony—"

"Better have given her a fast one. It came on so dark before he was half down the mountain that she was knocked out of the saddle by a branch. He went on down to the waterhole. She tried to catch him—couldn't. Got lost and wandered all around before she got down to the waterhole and caught him. We had got to the ranch at dusk, and all the posse had turned in for the night. She came loping down the divide just after moonrise. We started as soon as we could rake up all the picket-pins and rope. Wanted Mrs. Blake to wait and come on later; but talk about grit! We simply couldn't make her stay behind."

Isobel thrust herself free from her father's arms and darted out through the circle of rugged, earnest-faced punchers and cowmen to where Genevieve lay resting with the baby clasped to her bosom.

"Dear! you poor dear!" she murmured, kneeling to stroke the head of the weary young mother.

"I shall soon be rested," replied Genevieve. "How about Tom? Have you kept watch of him? Has he moved?"

The girl shrank back, unable to face her sister-in-law's eager look.

"No—I—The fire—it—it disappeared, and I could not see."

Genevieve smiled, and the reddening dawn lent a trace of color to her pale face. "It was a good sign. He could not have been suffering so much. He must have slept, and the fire died down."

"Oh! you think that was it?" sighed Isobel. "I feared—"

She did not say what it was she had feared. As she paused Genevieve looked up into her agitated face and asked quickly: "But Lafayette? Is he still sleeping?"

"Yes, where's Lafe, honey?" inquired Knowles. "We'll have to roust him out to tell us just what way he came up."

"Haven't I told you?" cried Isobel, her head still in a whirl of conflicting emotions. Then, as tersely and quietly as her father would have related it, she told the bald facts of how Ashton had been wakened by the snarl of the wolf, how he had insisted upon going back to help her brother, and how he had gone down into the darkness, the pack and lantern slung over his shoulder.

"By—James!" vowed Knowles, when she had finished. "Any man on the Western Slope say that boy's not acclimated, he'd better look for another climate himself."

"Gentleman," the sheriff addressed the exclaiming crowd, "you heard tell what the little lady had to say about her husband and this Lafe Ashton going down into Deep Canyon, where no man ever went before. Now Miss Chuckie has told us again how Ashton climbed up here, where no man in this section had a notion anything short of a mountain sheep could climb. Well, what does the gritty kid do but turn round and climb down again—in the dark, mind you! They're down there now, both of them—down in the bottom of Deep Canyon. We called them tenderfeet, that day when Mr. Blake honored our county seat by sidetracking his palatial car. Boys, down there in that hole are the two nerviest men I ever heard tell about. One of 'em has a broken leg. The other has broke the trail for us. I ask for volunteers to go down with me and yank 'em up out of there. Gentlemen, who offers?"

Instantly the crowd surged forward. Every man shouted, whooped, struggled to thrust himself ahead of the others and force the acceptance of his services on the sheriff.

"Hold on, boys!" he remonstrated. "Just hold your hawsses. I didn't ask for a stampede. You can't all go down. Last man over might get in a hurry to catch the first, and start a manslide."

"I vote we set a thirty-year limit," put in one of the younger punchers.

This raised a clamor of dissent from the older men.

"Tell you what," shouted another. "Let Miss Chuckie cut out the lucky ones."

"That's the ticket—Now you're talking!" Every man shouted approval, and fell silent as Isobel sprang up from beside Genevieve.

"Friends!" she exclaimed, her eyes radiant, "it's such times as these that makes life grand! I believe six of you would be enough, but I'll make it ten. First, I'm going to bar everyone who has a wife or children."

"That doesn't include me, honey," hastily protested her father.

"Then you come in the next—none over thirty-five nor under twenty."

A groan arose from some of the youngsters, but the older men took their disappointment in stolid silence. She went on with calm decisiveness: "Now those of you that have done any considerable mountain climbing afoot this summer, please step this way."

Two members of a recently disbanded surveying party, four punchers who had tried their luck at prospecting on the snowy range, and three wild horse hunters sprang forward in response to the request.

"That's enough," said the sheriff. "I've got to own up to being forty. But I'm leading this here posse, and I'll eat my hat if I can't outclimb anything on two legs in this county. String out your ropes, boys, and pass over all them picket-pins. We'll need a purchase now and again, I figure, hauling up Mr. Blake. Hustle! Here's the sun clean up."

Under the brusquely jovial directions of their leader, the lucky nine divested themselves of spurs and cartridge belts, tied themselves to the line at intervals of several feet, and promptly started down the dizzy ledges. The others helped them during the first fifty yards of descent with the line that Isobel had drawn up after it had been cast loose by Ashton. They then gathered along the brink, enviously watching the descent of their companions into the shadowy abyss.

Genevieve came to where Isobel and her father crouched beside the others. "Thomas will not let me put him down, Belle," she said. "I see you left the glasses beside the rock. If Lafayette has reached the bottom safely—"

"If—safely!" echoed Isobel. "Daddy, you look—quick, please!"

Knowles hastened to skirt along the brink to where the little field glasses lay at the near side of the split rock. The two followed him, Genevieve smiling with pleasant anticipation, Isobel trembling with doubt and dread. The cowman stretched out on the rim shelf and peered over.

"Um-m-m," he muttered. "Can't see anything down there. Too dark yet."

"Look straight below you," said Genevieve.

"Hey?—Uh! By—James! Well, if that ain't a picture now! These sure are mighty fine little glasses, ma'am. I can see 'em plain as day."

"Them?—you say 'them,' Daddy?" cried Isobel.

"Sure. Come and look for yourself. Guess Lafe is fixing Mr. Blake's leg.—Which reminds me, honey, that before we left the ranch, Mrs. Blake had me send for that lunger sawbones that's come to live at Stockchute. He'll be here, I figure, before or soon after the boys get Mr. Blake up into God's sunshine."

"Brother Tom, Daddy—you mean my Brother Tom!" joyfully corrected the girl as she took the glasses.

"Well, you've got to give me time to chew on it, honey. It's come too sudden for me to take it all in." He stood up and gazed gravely at the smiling mother and her comforted baby. "Hum-m-m. Then that yearling is my Chuckie's own blood nephew. Well, ma'am, what do you think of it, if I may ask?"

"Can't you make it 'Jenny,' Uncle Wes?" asked Genevieve.

He stared at her blankly. "But I didn't adopt him, ma'am—only her."

"He is the brother of your dear daughter, and I am his wife. Come now," she coaxed, "you must admit that brings me near enough to call you 'Uncle Wes.'"

"You've got me, ma'am—Jenny. I give in, I throw up the fight. That irrigation project now—Chuckie's brother can have anything of mine he asks for. Only there's one thing—you've got to make that yearling say 'Granddad' when he talks to me."

"O-oh!" cooed Genevieve. "To think you feel that way towards him! Of course he shall say it. And I—Will you not allow me to make it 'Daddy'?"

He could not resist her enticingly upturned lips. He brushed down his bristly mustache, and bent over awkwardly, to kiss his new daughter.

"Thought you were one of those super-high-toned ladies, m'm—Jenny," he remarked.

The cultured child of millions smiled up at him reproachfully. "What! after I have been with you so long, Daddy? But it's true there was a time—before Tom taught me that men cannot be judged by mere polish and veneer, or the lack of polish and veneer."

Isobel, all her doubts and fears allayed, had risen from the precipice's edge in time to hear Genevieve's reply. She added eagerly: "Nor should men be judged by what they have been if they have become something else—if they have climbed up—up out of the depths!"

"Belle! dear Sister Belle! Then he has proved it to you? Oh, I am so glad for you! He has proved to you that he has climbed—to the heights."

"To the very heights! I must tell Daddy. Give me Thomas. See, he is fast asleep, the poor abused little darling! Go and watch them, and our climbers. They are going down like a string of mountain sheep."

Genevieve placed the baby in his aunt's outstretched arms and went to look into the abyss through the field glasses. Isobel drew her father away, out of earshot of the down-peering group of men. She stopped behind the tent, which Gowan had pitched part way up the slope of the ridge.

"You want to talk with me about Lafe, honey?" surmised Knowles, as the girl started to speak and hesitated.

Her cheeks flamed scarlet, but she raised her shyly lowered eyes and looked up at him with a clear, direct gaze. "Yes, Daddy. He—he loves me, and I—love him."

"That so?" said Knowles. His eyes contracted. It was his only betrayal of the wrench she had given the tender heart within his tough exterior. "Well, I figured it was bound to come some day. I've been lucky not to lose you any time the last four years."

"You—you do not say anything about him, Daddy."

"Haven't you cut him out of the herd?" he dryly replied. "That's enough for me, long as I know he's your choice and is square."

"He has nothing; he is very poor."

"He's got the will to work. He'll get there, with you pushing on the reins. That's how I size him up."

"But, Daddy, he told me he had been bad, very bad."

Knowles searched the girl's face, with a sudden up-leaping of concern—that vanished as quickly before what he saw in her clear eyes.

"Might have expected it of you, honey. You stand by him. You've got sense enough to know what it means when a man thinks enough of a girl to tell her the wrong things he has done. I was wild, too, when I was a youngster. There was a girl I thought enough of to tell. She wasn't your kind, honey. It came near sending me to the devil for good. You know better. No girl ought to be fool enough to hitch up with a man to reform him. But if he has already taken a brace and straightened the kinks out of himself, that's different."

"He has come up, Daddy—out of the depths."

Knowles only half caught her meaning. "Sure he climbed up. That proves he has the grit and the nerve. He had proved that even better, going down at the other place. Put any man down there, and he'd make a try to get out. No, the real test was his going back down again. He might have come up just for himself. But going down again—that's the proof of what's in him; that's what proves he's white!"

"Dear Daddy!... But I'm afraid. He thinks he has been too bad ever to—to marry me. I'm so afraid he'll go away and leave me!"

The cowman straightened up, his eyes glinting with righteous indignation.

"What! Go 'way and leave you?—when you want him to stay? By—James! He's going to stay! Don't you worry, honey. He's going to stay, if I have to rope and hogtie him for you!"

The girl stared into the frowning face of her father. There was no twinkle in the corner of his eyes. He was absolutely serious. For the first time in over two days her dimples flashed. Her eyes sparkled with merriment. Her lips parted. But she checked the gay laugh before it could burst out.

"Oh!" she reproached herself. "How could I? And they still down there—and Tom suffering!"

"Tom?" repeated Knowles. "Thomas Blake—your brother! That's why you got me started reading all those reports and engineering journals. You guessed it."

"It did not seem possible. Yet I could not help hoping."

"Things do happen our way—sometimes," qualified Knowles. "Mrs. Blake—Jenny—says Lafe brought up word that the project can be put through. I meant to fight. But now—he is your brother, and he has done something no man ever before thought could be done—he has surveyed Deep Canyon. He has me beat. I've told Mrs.—Jenny straight out."

"I know he will do what is right by you, dear, dear Daddy."

"He's your brother, honey. That settles it."



CHAPTER XXXIV

RECLAMATION

Even with the mutual assistance that they could give one another, and with the certain knowledge that the descent was possible, the rescuers had no easy task following the trail "broken" by Ashton. Their very numbers prevented them from going down as fast as he had gone. On the other hand, those on the upper part of the life-line could steady their companions over ledges and down the steeper crevices, while the leaders helped the ones who followed by hammering footholds in the rock and at the very worst places driving in picket-pins to hold the extra ropes brought down for the purpose.

Still, Deep Canyon was Deep Canyon—the ladder it offered was a ladder of Titans. Many long hours of waiting passed after the rescuing party disappeared among the shadows less than a third of the way down the steep-sloping precipices, before they came struggling upwards again into view of the anxious watchers on the brink. The sun had circled well over into the western sky.

There was yet a thousand feet for the rescuers to clamber, hauling and pushing up in their midst the heavy body of the injured engineer. All during the first half of the ascent Blake had made the task as easy as he could by the strenuous exertion of the great strength still left in his arms and his sound leg. But at last the bandages that bound his broken leg had chafed in two on the rough ledges; and even his iron nerve had not long been able to withstand the torture of the twisting break.

He now dangled helpless in the sling by which they had secured him. Half the time he was mercifully unconscious; the other half his jaw was set rigid and his lips were compressed to stifle his groans of agony. Whenever possible Ashton climbed beside him, striving to ease the roughness of the ascent.

A full hour before they reached the top, the thin-faced consumptive surgeon arrived from Stockchute with his splints and medical case. Waited upon by Isobel and Genevieve, he was fully recovered from the exertion of his ride when at last the panting rescuers came toiling up to the brink.

Eager hands dragged the unconscious engineer to the top and carried him to where the surgeon sat waiting. A few of the watchers lingered to help the rescuers over the rim; then they, too, hurried away to see if Blake had survived that terrible ascent. For the last two hundred feet he had looked like a dead man. There was no cheering. Deep Canyon had been conquered; but it was yet to be seen whether the victory had not been won at a disastrous cost.

The sheriff and his nine men sank down on the grassy slope, gasping, outspent. Ashton collapsed in their midst. He was more than outspent; he was utterly exhausted. The instant he had seen Blake lifted over the rim-rock, he had given way to the strain of his frightful exertions. When a man sent by Isobel came hurrying to the rescuers with water and coffee, Ashton was unable to move or speak. The man had to hold him up and pour the coffee down his throat.

One by one, the sheriff and the others staggered up and went to join the silent group about Blake. No one left that circle of watchers. They were waiting for the result of the surgeon's efforts to resuscitate the unconscious man. It was a desperate fight. But the surgeon had won a place in the forefront of his profession before the white plague had driven him from New York to this health-giving wilderness. He knew all the latest, most wonderful methods of resuscitation. And he had for assistants two who loved and were loved by his patient.