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"Look out, Joe; it air a hundred feet, straight down!" she cried, as she saw that the baffled mountaineer was trembling on the chasm's edge, as if preparing for a spring. "Good night, Joe. Take my advice gin up th' still, an' all thought of makin' a wife of a girl as ain't willin'."
Strong arms reached for him. Strong hands gripped his clothing and lifted him from the terrible chasm's edge. "He's more dead than alive," said the big man, as he strove to pour a little whisky between the stranger's set teeth. "Well, I'll pack him home and do for him there." He lifted his weight easily, and placing him on his horse, led the animal to the cabin where he laid him in his own bunk.
Pictures were assembling more and more vividly in his mind the fight in the cabin, Nepeese, the wild chase through the snow to the chasm's edge even the memory of that age-old struggle when McTaggart had caught him in the rabbit snare. In his whine there was a great yearning, almost expectation. Then it died slowly away.
Now in this bruised path he stamped the imprints of her two rough shoes in moss and soil, and drove his own iron-shod feet wherever lichen or earth would retain the imprint. All the footprints pointed one way and ended at the chasm's edge.
But that was the only sound they heard; for the man himself lay still on the chasm's brink, propped from the depths by a tuft of alpine roses in full bloom, his blue eyes wide open, a blue hole just between them, and his bandaged hand freed from its camouflage, lying palm upward and quite uninjured on the grass!
McKay wriggled cautiously backward from the chasm's granite edge and crawled into the thicket of alpine roses where Evelyn Erith lay. "No way out, Kay?" she asked under her breath. "No way THAT way, Yellow-hair." "Then?" "I don't know," he said slowly. "You mean that we ought to turn back." "Yes, we ought to. The forest is narrowing very dangerously for us.
And here on a scrubby bush he left fragments of their garments entangled; and with his hobnailed heels he broke crumbling edges of rock and smashed the moss and stunted growth and tore a path among the Alpine roses which clothed the chasm's treacherous edge, so that it might seem as though a heavy object had plunged down into the gulf below.
They will never let a man alone, they, the herd, who cry "Madman!" when any worker and his work which they cannot comprehend rise before them. In the great moment when, after years of climbing, I stood victorious on the summit, they claimed that I had fallen to the chasm's depths, and confined me here at Staunton as a hopeless lunatic.
Now let me see you skip across that bridge, and no mistake about it." He darted across the chasm's bridge like a chamois. I followed him quick and clumsy. If my heart was in my mouth well, let that pass. Not for my own sake did I fear mortal man that day, but for the sake of a woman whose very life I believed to be in danger.
Up the naked precipice Clambers she, with footsteps light, O'er the chasm's dark abyss Leaps with spring of daring might; But behind, unweariedly, With his death-bow follows he. Now upon the rugged top Stands she, on the loftiest height, Where the cliffs abruptly stop, And the path is lost to sight. There she views the steeps below, Close behind, her mortal foe.
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