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.
[Illustration: Another desperate clutch at the rope--still another]
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.