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Page 27
There came little flat spaces, then broken boulders to clamber over,
then steep, rugged climbs, when they grasped the rough rocks with both
hands and moved on with painful slowness. It seemed to the girl that
they had been climbing for long, tedious hours since they had slipped
out of their saddles; though to him she said nothing, locking her lips
stubbornly, she knew that at last she was tired, very tired, that an
end of this laborious ascent must come soon or she would be forced to
stop and lie down and rest.
"Fifteen minutes more," said the sheriff, "and we're there. We'll use
the first five minutes of it for a rest, too."
He made her sit down, unstoppered a canteen which, like the coil of
rope, she had not known he carried, and gave her a drink of water which
seemed to her the most wonderfully strength-making, life-giving draft
in the world. Then he dropped down at her side, looked at his watch in
the light of a flaring match carefully cupped in his hand, and lighted
his pipe.
"Nearly midnight," he told her.
Without replying she lay back against the slope of the mountain, closed
her eyes and relaxed, breathing deeply. Her chest expanded deeply to
the long indrawn breath which filled her lungs with the rare air. She
felt suddenly a little sleepy, dreaming longingly of the unutterable
content one could find in just going to sleep with the cliff-scarred
mountainside for couch.
She stirred and opened her eyes. Rod Norton, the sheriff of San Juan,
a man who a few brief hours ago had been unknown to her, his name
unfamiliar, sat two paces from her, smoking. She and this man of whom
she still knew rather less than nothing were alone in the world; just
the two of them lifted into the sky, separated by a dreary stretch of
desert lands from other men and women . . . bound together by a bit of
rope. She tried to see his face; the profile, more guessed than seen,
appeared to her fancy as unrelenting as the line of cliff just beyond
him, clear-cut against the sky.
Yet somehow . . . she did not definitely formulate the thought of which
she was at the time but dimly, vaguely conscious . . . she was glad
that she had come to San Juan. And she was not afraid of the silent
man at her side, nor sorry that circumstance had given them this night
and its labors.
Norton knocked out his pipe. Together they got to their feet.
"More careful than ever now," he cautioned her. "Look out for each
step and go slowly. We're there in ten minutes. Ready?"
"Ready," she answered.
CHAPTER VII
IN THE HOME OF CLIFF-DWELLERS
Those remaining ten minutes tried all that there was of endurance in
Virginia Page. Often Norton, bidding her wait a moment, climbed on to
some narrow ledge above her and, drawing the rope steadily through his
hands, gave her what aid he could; often, clinging with hand and foot
she thought breathlessly of the steep fall of cliff which the darkness
hid from her eyes, but which grew ever steeper in her mind as she
struggled on. He had said it would be easier in daylight; she wondered
if after all it would not have been more difficult could she have seen
just what were the chances she was taking at every moment. But more
and more she came to have utter faith in the quiet man going on before
her, and in the piece of rope which stretched taut between them.
"And now," said Norton at last, when once more he had drawn her up to
him and they stood close together upon a narrow ledge, "we've got a
good, safe trail under foot. Good news, eh?"
But as he moved on now he kept her hand locked tight in his own. Their
"good, safe trail" was a rough ledge running almost horizontally along
the cliffside, its trend scarcely perceptibly upward. Within twenty
steps it led them into a wide, V-shaped fissure in the rocks. Then
came a sort of cup in a nest of rugged peaks, its bottom filled with
imprisoned soil worn from the spires above. As Norton, relinquishing
her hand, went forward swiftly she heard a man's voice saying weakly:
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