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The footsteps were light, too light and hurried, and not to be associated with hobnailed boots. Almost desperate at this cutting off of retreat, Tilda pulled Arthur Miles towards a wooden stairway, unrailed, painted over with Stockholm tar, built against the outside of the store, and leading to its upper chamber. "Up! and quick!" she commanded, pushing him before her.
It was now quite dark, there being no moon, and thin clouds obscuring the stars. The touch of her hand, which I perforce held since I must guide her over the long, narrow, and unrailed trestle, chilled me, and her breathing was hurried, but she moved by my side through the gross darkness unfalteringly enough.
Invisible, too, from thence was that eye he turned below, when, like the cannon booms, came up to him the people's combustions of applause. That which stirred them so was, seeing with what serenity the builder stood three hundred feet in air, upon an unrailed perch. This none but he durst do. But his periodic standing upon the pile, in each stage of its growth such discipline had its last result.
Beginning among quiet rice-fields and brown agricultural villages at an altitude of 5,000 feet, the track, usually bad and sometimes steep and perilous, passes through flower-gemmed alpine meadows, along dark gorges above the booming and rushing Sind, through woods matted with the sweet white jasmine, the lower hem of the pine and deodar forests which ascend the mountains to a considerable altitude, past rifts giving glimpses of dazzling snow-peaks, over grassy slopes dotted with villages, houses, and shrines embosomed in walnut groves, in sight of the frowning crags of Haramuk, through wooded lanes and park-like country over which farms are thinly scattered, over unrailed and shaky bridges, and across avalanche slopes, till it reaches Gagangair, a dream of lonely beauty, with a camping-ground of velvety sward under noble plane-trees.
We were on the unrailed front porch by that time, and Hotchkiss had put away his notebook. The mother of the twins followed us to the steps. "Dear me," she exclaimed volubly, "and to think I was forgetting to tell you! I put the young man to bed with a spice poultice on his ankle: my mother always was a firm believer in spice poultices. It's wonderful what they will do in croup!
He seemed fated to bring unhappiness on those he cared for Arúna, Lance, even Rose. And what of his father if he failed to marry? He hadn't even the grit to finish his wretched novel.... He rose at last, mechanically, and moved forward to the unrailed edge of all things. The magnetism of the depths drew him. The fatalistic strain in his blood drew him....
In one corner a section of the floor was elevated perhaps three feet above the rest, and directly back of this was a broad doorway, set in a short wall. The three advanced at once toward it. Here the electric torch came in very handy. It disclosed a poorly lighted stairway, very broad, unrailed, and preposterously steep. The steps were each over three feet high.
Then, outside in the hall room, that was really nothing more nor less than a landing for the unrailed stairs, she thought she could hear the old-fashioned voice of a very old-fashioned man he wanted to fetch her something, and he didn't seem to care just what. "Couldn't I git her a hunk of thet sausage that we brung home?" he begged. "You loon," was his answer. "Are you set on murder?
And now, as they whirled along, even Dabney's face paled a little. "I must reach the bridge before he does: he's just stupid enough to keep right on." It was very "stupid," indeed, for the driver of that one-horse "truck-wagon" to try and reach the little narrow unrailed bridge first. It was an old, used-up sort of a bridge, at best. Dab loosened the reins a little, but could not use his whip.
They made audible sounds even beneath the shadowy tread of the little girl, as she glided toward the top of a stair-case unrailed and out in the floor like the mouth of a well. Here she sat down, supporting her head with one hand, in an attitude of touching despondency. "I wonder oh, I wonder, if he will come!" she repeated, looking mournfully downward.
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