Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation

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 cañon 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 vertebræ scattered down the slope seemed to him the size of human ribs and vertebræ. He shuddered as they crunched under his tread.

Then he saw a skull with spiral-curved horns. He looked up the cañon 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 cañon–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 cañon 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 cañon 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 cañon 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 cañon curved to run towards Dry Fork Gulch. Between this point and the sharp bend opposite the gulch the precipices overhung the cañon 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 cañon. 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 cañon.

“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 cañon 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 cañon. That was four years ago. I have never since been able to go near the place.”

“Tom said that he rode all along the cañon 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 cañon 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.