Out Of The Depths Part 52

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 gla.s.ses 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 x.x.xIII

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 a.s.sured 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 h.e.l.l, 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 j.a.p 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 Canon, 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 Canon. 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.