Out Of The Depths Part 47

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 s.h.i.+rts 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 G.o.d!" 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--G.o.d! when I think of that! It has helped me through this fight--it helped me crawl up here with that leg dangling. Good G.o.d! 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 G.o.d! 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 canon 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 p.r.o.ng 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 b.u.t.t 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 canon 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 gla.s.ses--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 canon edge was not everywhere so easily approachable.

Many times the flash of Blake's revolver pa.s.sed 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.