THE PATH DOWN THE CLIFF
In the thick darkness half way between midnight and the first glimmer
of the new day Drennen awoke. That he must silence Sefton before Max
came up with him was the thought awaking with him. He was fully
conscious of his purpose before he knew what it was that had awakened
him.
Quite close to him was the noise of breaking brush and snapping twigs.
Evidently one of the pack animals had broken its tie-rope. He lifted
himself upon his elbow, frowning into the darkness. The horse was not
ten feet from him and yet it was hard to distinguish that darker blot
in the darkness which bespoke the brute's body.
"What is it?"
It was the voice of Kootanie George from the big Canadian's bed some
fifty feet away. It was the first time George had spoken to Drennen.
Drennen answered quietly:
"One of the horses has broken his rope."
Knowing that the animal might wander back along the trail and cause no
little delay in the morning, Drennen slipped on his boots and went to
tie him. The horse, seeing where the man could not, drew back toward
the cliffs. Drennen, led by the noise of breaking underbrush, at last
was enabled to make out distinctly the looming form in a little
clearing. Stooping swiftly, through a random clutch at the ground, he
was lucky enough to seize the end of the broken rope.
"It's Black Ben," he thought. "Max's horse."
A sudden temptation came to him. Puzzling it over he led the horse
slowly toward the grassy flat under the cliffs where the others were
tethered. Suppose that he turned Max's horse loose? And Kootanie's?
And that he should head them back along the trail? Not a pretty trick
to play, but was now the time for nicety? It would mean delay, not for
Drennen, but for Kootanie and Max . . . it might mean the opportunity
he wanted, to come up with Sefton before the others.
He passed close to where George lay. The Canadian had again drawn up
his blanket and was going back to sleep. The others were sleeping. It
was too dark for them to see what he was doing. Too dark for him to
more than make out the forms of the other horses when he came to the
flat under the cliffs. And by that time he had made up his mind; he
would take advantage of whatever came to his hand and ask no questions;
he would find George's pack animal in a moment and would then lead the
two of them around the camp and turn them loose.
Had he come to George's horse first he would have done so. But it
chanced that the first horse across whose tether he tripped was a big
black animal with the white strip from below the ears to the nostrils
showing in the gloom to which Drennen's eyes were accustomed now. This
was Lieutenant Max's horse, Black Ben! Then the horse he was
leading . . .
He swung about swiftly, gathering up the slackened rope, coming close
to the horse what had awakened him. It was like Black Ben, easily to
be mistaken even in a better light than this . . . but it was not
George's horse nor yet Max's. . . .
"A strange horse, here!" was his swift thought. "Whose?"
He ran his hands along the big brute's back. There was no saddle.
About the neck only a knotted rope. His hands ran on to the dragging
end of the rope. The strands were rough there, unequal, bespeaking a
tether snapped. He noted now, too, that the rope was damp and a little
muddy.
"He's come down the trail from the north. We are close to Sefton's
camp."
From the north because there was no place which Drennen remembered
having passed during the end of the day where a horse could muddy a
dragging rope. The lake shore was sand and gravel. And, before he had
gone to bed that night, he had seen a straggling stream which a little
further on ran across the morrow's trail, making shallow ponds in the
grass, the banks oozy mud.
Tying the strange horse swiftly, Drennen went back to his bed. He
found his rifle and cartridge belt, filled his pockets hit or miss from
his food pack, and, making no noise, returned to the flat. Again
leading the strange horse he pushed on, up trail, toward the muddy
brook.
Too dark to see more than the lowering mass of trees, the blackness of
the ground looking a bottomless pit under foot, the wall of cliffs
standing up against the stars. But slowly he could find his way to the
creek, across, and along the lake shore.
Again and again he stumbled against a boulder or tree trunk or clump of
bushes. He cursed his eyes for fools, drew back and around the
obstacle and pushed on. He would make little speed this way, but there
might arise the situation in which every moment would be golden.
After a little an inspiration came to him and he acted upon it swiftly.
He let the rope out through his fingers and holding it at the broken
end drove the horse on ahead of him, calculating upon the fact that it
could see even if he could not, and having been over the trail once
would travel it again in the darkness.
So Drennen made his way northward. Now he was making better time,
perhaps a couple of miles an hour. By dawn he would be several miles
ahead of the others, and then he could travel more rapidly.
But, before the dawn came, he must stop. He had come under the cliffs
which stood tall and bleakly forbidding at the upper end of the lake.
The horse came to a dead standstill. If there were a way up here, a
trail through the cliffs, the animal seemed to have no knowledge of it
and Drennen's blind groping could not discover it.
It was only through the mastery of a strong will, long seasoned and
drilled, that Drennen could force himself at last to sit down and wait
the coming of the light. His soul was in turmoil. His mind was filled
with broken fancies, tortured visions. In him the simplicity of a
normal existence had been phantastically twisted into complication.
Before him were Sefton and Lemarc and Garcia . . . and Ygerne Bellaire.
Behind him were George and Ernestine with their warped lives, Sothern
and Max with their souls upon the verge of convulsion. Max, young and
straightforward, his sky clear to the star of his duty, was sleeping in
ignorance, while if he but knew he would be torn a thousand ways. And
it seemed to Drennen that the restless thing in each of these lives,
behind him and in front of him, raised its hissing head to dart venom
into his own breast, to make for unrest and doubt there.
At last the objects about him were slowly restored to their own
individual forms from the void of the night. The trees separated, the
expanse of the lake grew grey and liquid, the cliffs showed their
ancient battle scars. And the trodden earth held fresh and plain the
trail he sought.
Leading the horse again, he climbed up from the level of the lake
toward the cliff tops. The trail, hazardous enough at all times,
looking now and then impossible, wound and twisted among the boulders,
snaked its way into a narrow gorge, mounted along a bit of bench land
clinging like a shelf to the mountain side, and in an hour's time
brought him to the top.
Now the day was full upon him. Behind and below lay the lake he had
just quitted. He could make out a plume of smoke where the impatience
of Max and George would be bestirring Itself. Ahead and below lay Red
Deer Lake, a thousand dizzy feet down, seeming impossible of
achievement from where Drennen stood. He pushed a stone over the rocks
with his boot. He saw it leap outward and drop, plummet wise, saw the
white spray of the lake leap upward as the stone plunged into the water.
Drennen had turned the horse loose. From the hog's-back upon which he
stood he could look down into a little valley lying to the eastward and
could make out in it two more pack animals, tethered. He headed this
one down the trail and then turned his eyes back toward Red Deer Lake
and, across it, to the cliffs beyond. For there he had seen a second
plume of smoke.
It seemed to him then that a man must have wings to reach that other
line of cliffs, on the far side of the lake, from which the smoke was
climbing upward. Everywhere the sheer precipices marched up to the rim
of the blue laughter of the water below him, so that one might believe
that neither man nor four-footed denizen of the forestland could come
here to drink; that only the birds, dropping with folded wings, could
visit its shore. But others had been here before him; and surely it
was their smoke which curled upward from the far cliffs. If they had
found a way to go on on foot, leaving their horses here, then he could
find it. And he must find it quickly . . . before Max and George.
First he noted the location of the smoke toward which he sought to go,
so that he would not miss it. Nature aided him, making the spot
distinctive. Everywhere the cliffs were barren, just rock and more
rock, a jumble of great boulders strewn along sheer precipices,
everywhere save alone in this one spot. But there was a scant table
land, and from it a small grove of pines rose high in the blue of the
brightening sky, their gnarled limbs still and sturdy. It was above
this single noteworthy clump of ancient boled trees to be seen upon
these inhospitable heights that the thin bluish smoke arose.
To Drennen, frowning across the gulf separating him and his quarry,
there seemed but one conceivable reason why a human being should have
sought to win a way to that rocky aerie. From its nature it was all
but unscalable; from its position it commanded in limitless, sweeping
view all possible paths of approach. Did Sefton's party seek a hiding
place where defence even against great numbers would be a simple
matter, this nest upon the cliff tops was the ideal spot.
Thus Drennen answered the riddle. But there were other riddles which
he could not answer and which he gave over. Why had the horses been
left where they would be found so readily? Why that careless beacon
smoke where no man could fail to see it?
Max would see it and he would be hurrying, swifter than Drennen had
come because now it was daylight. With the need of haste crying in his
ears Drennen experienced the slipping by of slow hours with nothing
accomplished. Back and forth along the edge of the cliffs he searched
eagerly, like some great, gaunt questing hound, baffled by a cold
track. Sefton and those with him had come here, had found the way
down, had gained the far side two miles away across the lake. They had
gone before, so he knew that he could come after. But he grew feverish
over the delay, thinking as much of Max behind as of Sefton in front.
Again and again he thought that he had found the way down only to be
driven back and up when he had made a few perilous feet downward along
the beetling fall of rock. He sought tracks and found nothing; there
was nothing but hard rock here which kept no impress less than that of
the tread of the passing centuries. He even went down into the little
valley where the horses were, hoping that through some deep cleft chasm
the trail led circuitously to the lake shore. But he came back, again
baffled, again hurrying with the certainty upon him that Max, too, was
hurrying.
The sun was three hours high when Drennen found what he sought. With
the keen joy at the discovery there came deep wonder. It was the
approach to the lake; but the wonder arose from the unexpected nature
of the path itself. He had passed further and further north along the
cliffs until a couple of miles lay between him and the spot where this
latest quest had begun. And he came now to a cleft in the rocks. On
each hand the cliffs fell apart so that at the top the chasm measured
perhaps ten or twelve feet. The chasm narrowed fifty feet below until
it formed a great V. Below that Drennen could not see until he had
made his precarious way down into the cut. And when he had come to
what had appeared from above to be the closed angle of the V he found
the rest of the way open to him. And the wonder arose from the obvious
fact that there were many rude steps not nature-made but man-made.
There were hand-holds scooped out here and there in the rock;
foot-holds chiselled rudely; and all bore the mark of no little age.
Grass grew scantily in the cracks; a young cedar, hardy, with crooked
roots like the claws of a monster, stood in one of the deeper scooped
hollows; the debris fallen into the man-made steps had accumulated
through the generations. In one of these places, when he had gone
downward a hundred feet, he came to a little space of soft soil which
held the trampled impress of boots.
Now, his rifle slung to his back, his fingers gripping at cracks and
seams and little knobs of stone, he made what speed he could. The way
he followed led along a long, horizontal fissure for a space, then
dipped dangerously near the perpendicular, then slanted off so that the
danger was less, greater speed possible. He did not look down to the
lake, fearing the dizziness which might lay hold of him and whip him
from the face of the cliffs like a fly caught in a rush of wind.
The thought entered his mind, "Ygerne Bellaire had gone on here before
him!" He pictured her confident bearing as she climbed down, her
capable hands clinging to the rocks, her fearless eyes as she looked
down at the blue glint of the lake a thousand feet below, the red curve
of her lips as she smiled her contempt of the danger. Be she what she
might, Ygerne Bellaire was not the coward he had once thought all women.
He grew angry with himself for harbouring a thought into which a tinge
of admiration for her entered. He was coming up with her soon; he
sneered at himself and at her and crept on downward.
Again and again the way looked impossible; again and again he found the
scooped-out handhold which carried him on. And yet it was another two
hours before he had dropped the last ten feet to the narrow, pebbly
shore of Red Deer Lake.
Now there would be no more lost time, no hesitation in finding the path
he must follow. For here, at the marge, were the tracks of those who
had gone before. And there was but one way these could lead. For upon
the left hand the cliffs came down to the water and there was no path;
upon the right there was a six-foot strip of uneven beach.
The sudden sound of a voice shouting dropped down to him. Jerking his
head up he made out the form of Lieutenant Max at the top of this
devil's stairway down which he had just come. Drennen laughed shortly
and turned northward along the lake shore. He had lost time but he
would lose no more. He still had two hours the best of it; it would
take Max fully that long to make the descent.
"When he comes up with me," was Drennen's quick thought, "my work will
have been done!"