CHAPTER XXVII
LOWER DEPTHS
Beetling precipices shut off the direct light of the moonbeams and left the abyss again in dense darkness long before the coming of the laggard dawn. Blake slept on, storing up strength for the renewal of the battle. Yet even he could not outsleep the reluctant lingering of night. He awoke while the tiny flame of the watchfire still flickered bright against the inky darkness of the sky.
Ashton had fallen into a fitful doze. The engineer stood up and silently groped his way to and fro on the shelf of rock, stretching and limbering his cramped muscles. He wasted no particle of energy; the moment he had relieved his stiffness he stretched out again. He lay contemplating that flame of love on the heights until it faded against the lessening blackness of the sky and the rays of the morning sun began to angle down the upper precipices.
He rose to take out two portions of food from the single pack in which he had bound up all the provisions. The portion for Ashton was small; his own was smaller. He roused the dozing man and placed the larger share of food in his hand.
“Don’t drop it,” he cautioned. “That’s all I can let you have. We must go on rations until we can see a way out of this hole.”
Ashton ate his meager breakfast without replying. The fire within him had burned to ashes. He was cold and dull and dispirited. He had failed. He would have been willing to sit and brood, and wait for God to answer his prayer.–But his waiting was not to be an inert lingering in the place where he had failed.
The moment the down-creeping daylight so lessened the gloom of the depths that Blake could take rod readings, he plunged over into the stream, with a curtly cheerful command for Ashton to prepare to follow. Too dejected even to resist, the younger man silently obeyed. When Blake signaled to him through the dimness, he held the rod on the last turning-point of the previous day, and lowered himself from the shelf down into the stream.
The evening before, the water at this point had come up to his waist. It was now only knee-deep. His surprise was so great that in passing Blake he broke his sullen silence to remark the fact and ask what could have caused the change.
“Melting of the snow on the high range,” the engineer shouted in explanation. “Takes time for it to run down the cañon all these miles. River probably still falling. Will begin to rise about noon. Faster we get along now, the easier it will be. Hustle!”
Ashton responded mechanically to the will of his commander. For the time being his own will was almost paralyzed. The reaction from his long-sustained rage had left him dazed and nerveless. He had sunk into a state of fatalistic indifference. He moved quickly downstream from turning-point to turning-point, driven by Blake’s will, but with a heedless recklessness that all Blake’s warnings could not check.
Within the first hour he twice stumbled and went under while wading deep reaches of the river, and once he fell from a ledge, bruising himself severely and knocking a splinter from the rod. Half an hour later he lost his footing in descending a swift and narrow place that would have been impassable at high water. Had not Blake been below him he would never have come out alive.
The engineer leaped in and dragged the drowning man to safety, after a desperate struggle with the torrent. But in the wild swirl, both the food-pack and the rod went adrift. The moment he had rescued his companion, Blake rushed away downstream, leaping like a goat from rock to rock. He at last overtook the rod, caught in the eddy of a pool. Of the pack he could find no trace. He returned to Ashton and silently handed him the rod.
There was no need for him to admonish. The loss of all the food and the narrowness of his escape had sobered the younger man. He resumed his work with a cautious swiftness of movement that avoided all needless risks yet never hesitated to encounter and rush through the dangers that could not be avoided. In this he copied Blake.
All the time they were advancing down the angry torrent, deeper and deeper into its secret stronghold,–creeping, crawling, leaping, wading, swimming–step by step, turn after turn, wresting from the abyss that which the engineer was resolved to learn, even though he should learn, only to perish.
The day advanced. Steadfastly they struggled on down the bed of the river, twisting and crossing over with the winding course of the chasm; now between beetling precipices that shut out all sight of the blue-black sky; now in more open stretches where the Titanic walls swung apart and the glorious hot sun rays pierced down into the very depths to warm their drenched bodies and lighten their heavy spirits.
Ashton had long since lost all count of time. His watch had been smashed in his first fall of the day. But Blake seemed to have an intuitive sense of time. At fairly regular intervals he fired a shot to tell the watchers above the extent of their progress. Sometimes the answering flag-signal could be seen waving from the rim of the cañon. But in many places those above could not come near the brink to look over.
The approach of midday found the bruised and weary fighters struggling through one of the narrowest reaches of the cañon. The precipices jutted out so far that the lower depths seemed more cavern than chasm, and the river swirled deep and swift between sheer, narrow walls. Twice Ashton was swept past what should have been the next turning-point, and Blake, unable to see the figures on the rod, had to guess at his readings.
At last the precipices swung apart and showed the sky at a twist in the cañon’s course that was the sharpest of all the turns the explorers had as yet encountered. As Blake came wading down past Ashton, along the inner curve of the bend, he stopped and pointed skywards. Ashton raised his drooping head and peered up at the rim of the opposite wall. From the brink a dense column of green-wood smoke was rising into the indigo sky.
“One more set-up,” shouted Blake.
Three minutes later he took a reading on the water and on a point of rock at the angle of the cañon-side around which the river swung in its sharp curve. Three more minutes, and the two battered fighters stood together on the last bench of that tremendous line of levels, with torn and rent clothing, sodden, gaping boots, bodies bruised from head to foot–bleeding, weary, but victorious! They had finished the work that Blake had set out to do.
He held up the now-soaked notebook for Ashton to see the last penciled elevation on the wet paper.
“Two thousand, forty-five!” he shouted. “Over five hundred feet above that bench in Dry Greek Gulch! Water, electricity!–Dry Mesa shall be a garden!”
Ashton stared moodily into the exultant face of the engineer.
“Are you sure of that?” he asked. “How do you know that God will let you climb up out of this hell of stone and water?”
“There’s the saying, ‘God helps those who help themselves,’” replied Blake. “I’m going to put up the best fight I can. If that doesn’t win out, I shall at least have the satisfaction of not having quit. If you wish to pray, do so. The sooner we start the better. From now on, the water will be rising.”
“I prayed last night,” said Ashton. He added somberly, “And now we are both going to the devil.”
“No,” said Blake, with no less earnestness. “There is no devil–there is no room for a devil in all the universe. What man calls evil is ignorance,–his ignorance of those primeval forces of nature which he has yet to chain; his ignorance of those higher qualities in his own nature which, if known, would prevent him from wronging others and would enable him to bring happiness to himself and others.”
“You say that!” cried Ashton. “You can mock! You do not believe in hell!”
Blake smiled grimly. “What do you call this?–But you mean a hell hereafter. I believe this: If, when we pass into the Unknown, we continue to exist as individual consciousnesses, then we carry with us the heaven and the hell that we have each upbuilt for ourselves.”
“God will not let you escape,” stated Ashton. “You will pass from this hell of water into the hell of fire and brimstone.”
“Have it your own way,” said Blake. “I lived one summer in Death Valley. The other place can’t be much hotter.”
He climbed up the ledges and planted the level firmly on its tripod above the high-water mark of the spring floods. He called down to Ashton: “Hate to leave the old monkey up here; but it will serve as a memento of our present visit, when we come down again to locate the tunnel head.”
“How can it be that we shall ever come down again?” replied Ashton. “It is impossible–for we shall never go up.”
Blake jumped down the ledges to him and pointed to the column of smoke on the lofty heights.
“Look there,” he said. “That is where we are going, if there is any possible way to go. An optimist would stand here and wait, certain that wings would soon sprout for him to fly up; a pessimist would sit down and quit. An optimist is a fool; a pessimist is a worse fool.”
“And which are you?” asked Ashton.
“I am neither. I am a meliorist. I am going to face the facts, and then fight for all I’m worth. What’s more, you’re going to do the same. Come! We’ve still got some clothes left, the rod for you to use as a staff, this rope, the revolver, and seventeen cartridges. It’s fortunate we have any. We’ve got to signal that we are going on down the cañon, instead of back up.”
“We may as well stay and die here. But since you prefer to keep moving, I have no objections,” said Ashton, with ironical politeness.
Blake promptly stepped into the water and led the way to the next shelf of rock. Here he fired a shot. Going a few yards farther along the rocks, he fired again. Three times he fired, at intervals of two minutes. Then the white dot of the flag appeared on the precipice brink directly up across from him.
“Once more, and we’re sure they understand,” he said.
Advancing a full hundred yards on down the cañon, he fired the fourth shot. Very soon the fleck of white flaunted on the rim a little way beyond them.
“They understand!” cried Blake. “Trust Jenny to use her head! Now catch your breath and tighten up. We’re going to move!”
He started, and Ashton followed close behind. It was the same rough, fierce game of leaping, crawling, wading, swimming,–battling with the river, the rocks, the ledges. But now they were no longer checked and halted by the alternate stoppings for set-ups and turning-points, and no longer was Blake encumbered with the care of the level. There was nothing now to hinder or delay them except the natural obstacles of their wild path down the bed of the torrent.
Blake could give all his thought to picking the best and quickest way through rapids and falls, over the water-washed rocks and along the side ledges. And he could give all his great strength to helping his companion past the hard places. In return Ashton gave such help as he could to the engineer, many times when a steadying hand or the outstretched rod rendered easier a descent or the fording of some swift mill race in the stream.
At the end of the first quarter-mile Blake had fired a shot, and again at the second quarter. After that he waited longer intervals. He considered it advisable to husband the few remaining cartridges.
The river was now rapidly rising. But every inch of added depth found the two fugitives much farther down the cañon. In two hours they advanced thrice the distance that they had covered in the same time before noon, and this despite the increasing depth and force of the river.
The pace was so hot that Ashton was beginning to stumble and slip, but Blake kept by him and helped him along by word and deed. He asserted and repeated a dozen times over, that they were nearing the place where an ascent of the precipices might be possible. At last they rounded a turn in the winding chasm, and Blake was able to point to a break in the sheer wall on the Dry Mesa side, where the precipices were set back one above the other in a Cyclopean stepladder and their steeply-pitched faces were rough with crevices and shelves.
“Look!” he cried. “There’s the place–there’s our ladder up from hell to heaven!”
Ashton soon lowered his weary head. He stared dully downstream to where a fifty-foot cliff extended across from side to side of the cañon like a dam.
“Part of the wall slid in,” he stated with the simplicity of one who is nearing exhaustion.
“That shall be our bridge to the ladder,” shouted Blake. “It’s all sheer cliff along here at the foot of the break, but the ledges run down sideways to the top of the cross cliff. We shall soon be lying up there, high and dry, getting our second wind for the run up the ladder.”
The engineer spoke confidently, and felt what he spoke. But as they struggled on down the turbulent stream to the cross cliff, the light left his face. From wall to wall of the cañon the great mass of fallen rock stretched across the bottom in a sheer-faced barrier, broken only by a tunnel barely large enough to suck in the swelling volume of the river.
Blake came down close to the intake, scanning every foot of the cliff face for a scalable break or crevice. There was none to be found. He climbed along the cliff foot to a low shelf beside the roaring tunnel, and stood staring at the opening in deep thought. Even while he looked, the swelling volume of the river filled the tunnel to its roof. Blake peered at the fresh watermark twenty feet up the face of the cliff, and bent down beside Ashton, who had stretched out to rest on the shelf of rock.
“There’s only one thing to it, old man,” he said. “We must dive through that tunnel.”
“Through that hole?” gasped Ashton. “No! I’ve done enough. I shall stay here.”
“To drown like a rat in a rainwater barrel!” rejoined Blake. “Look at that watermark. The tunnel is now running full. Inside a quarter-hour the river will be up over this ledge. It will keep rising till it reaches that mark, and it will not fall until after low water.”
“What do I care?” said Ashton hopelessly. “Go to the devil your own way. I’d rather drown here than in that underground hole. Leave me alone.”
Blake considered a full half minute, looked up the cliff face, and replied: “Perhaps it’s as well. I shall do the best I can. But first I want to tell you I’ve wiped out all that past affair. You are another person from that Lafayette Ashton. We stand here almost face to face with the Unknown. One or both of us may soon go out into the Darkness. As we may never meet again, I wish to tell you that you have proved yourself, even more than I hoped when I saw you come rushing down the ravine to join me. You have proved yourself a man. Good-by.”
He held out his hand. But Ashton turned his face to the wall of rock and was silent. After a time he heard the sound of Blake’s worn heels on the outer end of the shelf. His ears, attuned to the ceaseless tumult of the waters, caught the click of the protruded heel-nail heads. There was a brief pause–then the plunge. He looked about quickly and saw Blake’s hands vanish in the down-sucking eddy where the swollen waters drew into the now hidden intake of the tunnel.
A cry of horror burst from his heaving chest. Blake had gone–Blake the iron-limbed, iron-hearted man. He had conquered the river–and now the wild waters had seized him and were mauling and smashing and crushing him in the terrible mill of the cavern. Beyond that underground passage, it might be miles away, the victor would fling up on some fanged rock a shapeless mass that once had been a man.
CHAPTER XXVIII
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.
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.