CHAPTER XXIII
THE TEMPTATION
When the ladies explained their plans for remaining in camp on High Mesa, Blake gave a ready assent.
“All right, Jenny. It’ll be something like old times. Can’t scare you up any lions or fever, leopards or cyclones; but you may see that wolf.”
“I should welcome all savage Africa if it would rid us of this awful cañon!” replied his wife.
“Won’t you please give it up?” begged Isobel. “I am to blame for your coming here. If anything should happen to you, I–I could never forgive myself–never!”
Blake looked at the two lovely, anxious faces before him, and smiled gravely. “There you go again, and you have yet to see that gulch. But even if you find that it looks dangerous, you wouldn’t want me to let a little risk interfere with my work, would you? Think of the fools who climb the highest and steepest mountains just for sport. I am going down there because it is necessary.”
“But is it?” the girl half sobbed.
“Someone must do it, sooner or later,” he replied, and he took his wife’s hand in his big palm. “Come, little woman, speak up. Do you want your husband to be a shirker and quitter?”
“Of course not, Tom. Yet one should be reasonable.”
“I have had enough experience in climbing to know not to attempt the impossible, Sweetheart,” he assured her. “The worst looking places are not always the most dangerous. I promise you to take only reasonable risks.”
“Have we time enough to look at the place this afternoon?” she inquired.
Blake glanced at the sun, and nodded. “The riding is good. We can get back long before dark. Ashton, you had better stretch out and rest.”
“No, I shall go with you,” replied Ashton, his lips set in as firm lines as Blake’s.
“You cannot go, Lafe, unless you agree to ride my pony,” said Isobel.
“I’m not going to have Gowan call me a baby again,” he objected.
“You will need all your strength tomorrow,” predicted Blake.
“You must ride,” insisted Isobel.
“Very well–to please you,” he agreed. “We shall take turns.”
Blake again looked at the sun. “As long as we are going, we may as well carry forward the line of levels. We can take long turns nearly all the way, so there will be little delay.”
“And I shall rod for you!” delightedly exclaimed Isobel.
“Only part of the time,” qualified Ashton with a sharpness that the others attributed to his zeal to serve her.
He filled his canteen from one of the cans of water brought up by Gowan, and rinsed out the mouths and nostrils of the thirsty ponies. This done, he and Genevieve mounted, and the party started off on a route parallel with the cañon, which here trended back away from the edge of the plateau.
They soon came to where the surface of the mesa was slashed with gulleys and ravines, all running down into the cañon. Blake swung away from the cañon, in order to head the worst of these ravines or to cross them where they were less precipitous. Presently, however, he struck in again towards the great rift along the flank of a high barren ridge. At last he led over the ridge and down to the side of a very large ravine where it pitched into the cañon at an angle little less steep than the descent of Dry Fork Gulch.
The line of levels, as Blake had foretold, had been an easy one to run. It was stopped on the corner of a shelf of rock that jutted out above the gorge. Having provided a soft nest for the baby, the four went out on the shelf and peered down the dizzy slope into the black shadows of the depths.
The two ladies drew back shuddering. Blake looked about at them and seeing their troubled faces, sought to quiet their dread.
“You have not looked close enough,” he said. “With spikes and ropes, the worst of this will be comparatively easy. There are ledges and crevices all the way down. You cannot see the lower half. When I was here with Gowan and Mr. Knowles, the sun was shining to the bottom. The lower half of the descent is much less steep than this you see.”
Genevieve smiled trustfully. “Oh, if you say it is safe, Tom!”
“We shall take down the rope and all the spikes we can carry,” he explained in further reassurance. “At the worst places a spike and a piece of the rope will not only let us down safely, but can be left for our ascent.”
“Then it will be all right!” sighed Isobel.
“For him–yes!” broke in Ashton, his voice harsh and strained. He was cringing back, white-faced, from the edge of the gulch.
“Why, Lafe!” exclaimed the girl. “If Tom–Mr. Blake goes down, surely you can’t mean that you–”
“He’s used to climbing–I’m not!” Ashton sought to excuse himself.
“Oh, very well,” she said. “Of course it is not right to ask you to do it if you suffer from vertigo. I shall ask Kid to take your place. If he refuses, Daddy will do it.”
“That may mean delay,” remarked Blake. “If that scoundrel really is headed for Utah, your father may not be back for several days. Yet he asked me to settle this matter as soon as possible.”
“Then, if Kid will not go down with you, I shall,” declared the girl, her blue eyes flashing.
“No, no indeed, dear!” protested Genevieve. “It is simply impossible! You shall not do it!”
“I shall, unless Kid–”
“You shall not ask him!” interposed Ashton, his pale face suddenly flushing a hot red. “I am going down!”
“You will, Lafayette?” cried Genevieve. “That is very brave and–and kind of you!”
“But if you have no experience in climbing?” objected Isobel in a tone that transmuted the young man’s angry flush into a glow of delight.
“Don’t inexperienced climbers go up the Alps with guides?” he nonchalantly replied. “I can trust Blake to get me safe to the bottom. He will need me in his business.”
“Good for you, Lafe!” commended Blake.
It was the first time that he had ever addressed Ashton so familiarly. He accompanied it with the proffer of his hand. But Ashton did not look at him. He was basking in the frankly admiring gaze of Miss Knowles.
The party returned in the same manner that they had come out, for Isobel firmly refused to permit Ashton to walk. Blake allowed her to set the pace, and she chose such a rapid one that they reached camp a full half hour before sunset.
A few minutes later, as they were sitting down to a hastily prepared supper, Gowan appeared with the second load from the lower camp. Blake and Ashton sprang up to loosen the packs of the sweating, panting horses. The puncher swung down from his saddle, not to assist them, but to remonstrate with Isobel.
“Been expecting to meet you, all the way up, Miss Chuckie,” he said. “Ain’t you staying too late? You won’t get home before long after dark.”
“Mrs. Blake and I are not going down tonight, Kid,” replied the girl, and she explained the change of plans.
Gowan listened attentively, though without commenting either by look or word. When she had quite finished, he asked a single question: “Think your Daddy won’t mind, Miss Chuckie?”
“He will understand that we simply can’t leave here until Lafe and–Mr. Blake are safe up out of the cañon.”
“All right. You’re the boss,” he acquiesced. “Just write out a list of what you want. I’ll take all the hawsses down to the waterhole, and go on to the ranch. You can look for me back at sunup. The moon rises between three and four.”
“Genevieve, will you make out the list? Sit down and eat, Kid.”
“Well, just a snack, Miss Chuckie. Wouldn’t stop for that if the hawsses didn’t know the trail well enough to go down in the dark.”
“Have you seen any sign of the murderer?” inquired Ashton.
Gowan drained the cup of scalding hot coffee handed to him by Isobel, and answered jeeringly: “Don’t worry, Tenderfoot. He won’t try to get you tonight. If he came back today, he saw me around. If he comes back tonight, he won’t think of climbing High Mesa to look for you.”
Blake came to the puncher with a list written by himself and his wife on a leaf from his fieldbook. Gowan folded it in his hatband, washed down the last mouthful of bread and ham that he had been bolting, and went to shift his saddle to Isobel’s pony, the youngest and freshest of the horses. In two minutes he was riding away down the ridge, willingly followed by the four other horses. They knew as well as he that they were returning to the waterhole.
As the campers again sat down to their supper Isobel paused with the coffeepot upraised. “Genevieve,” she inquired, “did you put cream on the list?”
“Why, no, my dear. It did not occur to me.”
“Nor may it to Yuki. He will be sure to send eggs and butter, but unless he thinks to save tonight’s cream–I’ll run and tell Kid.”
Ashton sprang up ahead of her. “I’ll catch him,” he said, and sprinted down the ridge.
Racing around a thicket of scrub oak, he caught sight of Gowan more than an eighth of a mile ahead. He whistled repeatedly. At last Gowan twisted about in the saddle, and drew rein. He did not turn back, but made Ashton come all the way to him.
“Well, what’s wanted?” he demanded.
“Cream,” panted Ashton. “Miss Chuckie says–tell Yuki.”
“Shore pop, I’ll bring all there is,” replied Gowan. Ashton started back. “Hold on,” said the puncher. “I want to say something to you, and here’s the chance.”
“What is it?”
“About him. I want you to keep a mighty close watch tonight.”
“But you said that the murderer would not–”
“Bah! What does he count in this deal? It’s this engineer. I’ve been chewing it over all afternoon. Miss Chuckie is as innocent and trusting as a lamb, spite of her winterings in Denver, and she’s plumb locoed over him, reading so much about him in the reports.”
“Still, it does not necessarily follow–”
“Don’t it, though!” broke in the puncher. “Guess you didn’t find it any funnier than I did seeing her hanging onto his shoulder.”
“Curse him!” cried Ashton, his jealousy flaring at the remembrance.
“Now you’re talking!” approved Gowan. “That shows you like her like I do. You’re not going to stand for her losing her fortune.”
“Her fortune?”
“By his flooding us off our range.”
“Ah–as for that, I have been thinking it over. She told me Mr. Knowles owns five sections. If water is put on them–Western Colorado fruit lands are very valuable, you know.”
“That’s a lie. Water can’t make five sections worth a range like ours. But supposing it could–” the puncher leaned towards Ashton, his eyes glaring with the cold malignancy of a striking rattlesnake’s–“supposing it could, how about us letting her lose her good name?”
“Good God!” gasped Ashton. “It can’t come to that!”
“Can’t it? can’t it? Where’s your eyes? And him a married man! The–” Gowan cursed horribly.
“You really believe it!” cried Ashton, convinced by the other’s outburst.
“Believe it? I know it!” declared Gowan. “If you thought half as much of her as I do–”
“I do!–not half, but a hundred times more!”
“Yes, you do?”
“I swear it! I’d do anything for her!”
“Except save her from him.”
“No, no! How can I? Tell me how!”
The puncher bent nearer to the half-frenzied man. “You’re going down that gulch with him. Suppose a spike gets knocked out or a rope breaks or a loose rock gets pushed over?”
“God!” cried Ashton, putting his hands over his eyes. “That would be murder!”
“Bah! You’d make a dog sick! Willing to do anything for her–except save her from him! And nothing to it but just an accident that’s just as like as not to happen anyway.”
“But–murder!” shudderingly muttered Ashton.
“Murder a skunk,” sneered Gowan. “If saving her from him isn’t a case of justifiable homicide, what is? Don’t you get the idea? Just a likely accident, down there where nobody can see.”
Ashton dropped his hands, half clenched, to his sides. Beads of cold sweat were gathering and running down his drawn face.
“I can’t!” he whispered. “I–I can’t!”
“Not if I agree to get out of the way and give you clear running?” tempted Gowan.
“You would?”
“Yes. You see how much I like her. You rid her of him, and I’ll let you have her for doing it.”
Ashton shuddered.
“Think it over–and watch him mighty close tonight,” advised the tempter.
A red flush leaped into Ashton’s face. Gowan struck his spurs into his horse’s flank and loped away.
Ashton stood motionless. The puncher disappeared down the mountain side. The twilight faded and darkness closed down about the tortured man. He stood there motionless, his convulsed face alternately flushing and paling, his eyes now clouding, now burning with rage and hate.
When at last he returned to the camp he kept beyond the circle of firelight. Hurriedly he rolled up in his blankets for the night, muttering something about his head and his need of rest for the next day’s work. The others accepted the explanation without question. They formed a cheerful domestic group about the fire from which he was shut out by his passion.
The ladies withdrew into the tent at an early hour. Blake strolled around the camp until after nine o’clock, but finally came with his blankets and companionably rolled up near Ashton. He was soon fast asleep. But Ashton lay tossing until after midnight. Weariness at last weighed down the lids of his hot eyes and numbed his tortured brain. He sank into a feverish sleep haunted with evil dreams.
CHAPTER XXIV
BLIND LOVE
At sunrise the harassed dreamer awoke to find Gowan gazing down at him somberly.
“You–you here?” he exclaimed, starting up on his elbow. “What is–” He checked himself and muttered brokenly, “I’ve been dreaming–horrible nightmares.”
“He’s down there overhauling his outfit,” said Gowan. “Hope you’ve thought the matter over.”
“My answer must be the same. I cannot do it, I cannot!” replied Ashton. He spoke hurriedly, as if afraid to linger on the thought.
“You can’t–not to save her and have me give her to you?” asked Gowan.
Ashton clenched his hands and bent over in an agony of doubt and indecision.
“You devil!” he groaned.
“What! Because I’m willing to give her up, in order to see her saved?”
“Why don’t you shoot him, if you’re so anxious?” queried Ashton.
“And hang for it,” retorted the puncher. “You can do it with an accident, and no risk. Anyway, that’ll make things easier for his wife–to have him meet a natural death. Won’t be anything said about why he was taken off. She hasn’t begun to suspect what’s going on between him and–”
Gowan paused, looked at the tent, and concluded: “I’ve done my part. I won’t say any more. But just you remember what I’ve told you. You won’t run any risk. Mr. Knowles hasn’t come back yet. There’ll be only them and me along, and we won’t be able to see you do it. Just remember what it will mean to her–just remember that–when you get him where a shove or a loosened spike–Savvy?”
He went to loosen the diamond hitch of the packs that he had brought with him from the ranch. Ashton sank back and lay brooding until the girl came from the tent and called to inquire how he felt. Too wretched to care about his appearance, he rose and went over to her.
“Oh!” she exclaimed at sight of his haggard face. “You are ill!”
“Only an attack of indigestion and loss of sleep–something I often have,” he lied. “A cup of coffee will set me up. Don’t worry. I’m strong–head doesn’t bother me at all this morning, except a numb feeling inside.”
“I shall dress the wound at once, while the coffee is boiling,” she replied.
He would have objected. She silenced him with a look that acted on his chafed spirit like oil upon a burn. Her kind, almost tender voice and the soft touch of her fingers on his head soothed his anguish and seemed to counteract the poison instilled by Gowan. He began to doubt the puncher and the witness of his own eyes.
When Blake and his wife came to breakfast, Ashton was so cheerful that they hardly noticed the traces of haggardness that yet lingered in his face. Blake at once centered the attention of all by explaining his plans for the exploration of the cañon. In addition to the surveyor’s chain, a hammer, and the rope and spikes,–which were to be used only in making the descent,–he and Ashton were to carry the level and rod and a quantity of food. At the suggestion of Isobel, he agreed to take her father’s revolver and fire it at intervals, on the chance that the watchers above might see the flash of the shots and so be able to follow the progress of the explorers down in the depths.
Genevieve quickly thought out signals to be given in response. If at night, a torch was to be cast down into the chasm; if in the daytime, a white flag, made of a sheet sent by Yuki, was to be waved out over the brink. As the explorers might become confused in the gloom of the cañon bottom, the point of the bend opposite Dry Fork Gulch was to be marked by a beacon fire built on the verge of the cañon wall.
Blake had already arranged everything that he and Ashton were to take down with them. Immediately after breakfast the outfit was fastened on the packhorses, together with food, water and blankets for those who were to remain on the heights. The ladies were determined to keep above the explorers at all points where the rim of the cañon could be approached. Gowan was to fetch and carry for them and take the horses down to the pool for water at night.
Within half an hour after breakfast the party was jogging away from camp, fully equipped for the great undertaking. Gowan was afoot. His horse, as well as the regular pack animals, was heavily loaded with stores. He walked with Isobel, who had insisted that Ashton should ride her pony. Blake strode along at his wife’s stirrup, carrying his son in a clasp as tender as it was strong.
The engineer was the only cheerful member of the party. Even Thomas Herbert, that best tempered of babies, was peevish and fretful. He was instinctively reflexing the suppressed nervousness and anxiety of his mother. Gowan and Ashton were as gloomy in look and speech as the shadowy depths of the cañon. Isobel bravely sought to respond to Blake’s confidence in the favorable outcome of the survey; but her smile, like Genevieve’s, was forced and her eyes were troubled.
They reached the point of attack as the rays of the morning sun were beginning to strike down into the side gorge. This was as Blake had planned. He at once began to direct the preparations for the descent, himself doing the lion’s share of the work.
A long detour to a point higher up the ravine offered an easy descent of its bottom to the place where it pitched steeply into the cañon. Blake preferred to take a short cut down the almost vertical side of the gulch. The three pieces of rope, each a hundred feet long, were knotted together and used to lower a grass-padded package containing all the equipment of the explorers except the level. The bundle was lodged on a broad shelf of rock, over two hundred and fifty feet down.
“Our first measurement,” remarked Blake, as he subtracted from three hundred feet the length of the line left above the edge of the cliff. He jotted down the remainder in his notebook, and nodded to Ashton, who, with Gowan and Isobel, was holding the end of the rope. “You see why I had Mr. Gowan bring gloves and chaps and your leggins. We will make the line fast around that rock, and follow our outfit.”
Ashton stared, slack jawed. “Really, you cannot mean–?”
“Yes. Why not?” asked Blake. “There’s nothing to a slide like this except the look of it.”
“Oh, Tom!” breathlessly cried Genevieve. “Are you sure–quite sure!”
“Sure I’m sure, little woman,” he replied. “There’s not the slightest danger. This is a new manila rope, and the package, with all those spikes in it, weighs as much as I do. That gives us a sure test.”
“I might have known!” she sighed her relief.
“Still it does look a bit stiff for a start-off,” he admitted. “If Lafe prefers, he can go around and come down the ravine bed. I shall slide the line and be getting the outfit in shape for shooting the chutes.”
“How about the rope?” asked Isobel.
“You are to drop it to me as soon as I get down and stand from under,” directed Blake. He examined with minute care the loop and knot with which Gowan and Isobel had made the rope fast around the point of rock. Having satisfied himself that the knot was perfectly secure, he turned to his wife and opened his arms. “Now, Sweetheart! Wish us good luck and a quick journey!”
Gowan and Ashton drew back and looked away as Genevieve flung herself on her husband’s broad chest, unable to restrain her tears.
“Now, now, little woman,” he soothed, patting her shoulder. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, and you know it.”
“If–if only we could see you down there!” she sobbed.
“You will, part of the time, with your glasses. And you’ll be sure to see the flash of some of my shots. That’s all that I’m worrying about–you’ll be skirting along the cañon rim. Promise me you’ll not go near the edge except where the footing is perfectly safe.”
“Yes, Dear. I shall have Thomas to remind me to be careful. But you?”
“I shall have the thought of you both to keep me from being rash. Remember that.”
“You will not be rash, I know,” she answered, smiling up at him bravely. “You will go and come back to us soon. Now kiss me and Thomas. I shall not detain you from your work.”
“Spoken like my partner,” he quietly praised her.
Both by tone and manner he was plainly seeking to ease the parting to the calmness of an ordinary farewell. His wife responded to this, outwardly at least. Not so Isobel. From the moment he had turned to Genevieve, the girl had betrayed a rapidly increasing agitation.
He went to kiss his baby, who had fallen asleep during the last half mile of the trip and lay sprawled in the shade of a bowlder. As he came back, Genevieve lingered beside the child, as if half fearful of watching her husband begin his dizzy descent of the rope.
Isobel was standing close to the verge, her bosom heaving with quick-drawn breaths, her excited face flushing and paling in rapid alternation. Blake had pulled on his left glove, but had kept his right hand bare for her. As he held it out he looked up from the taut rope at his feet and saw her excessively agitated face.
“Why, Miss Chuckie!” he remonstrated, “you’re not going to break down now. You see how Jenny takes it. There’s nothing to fear.”
“Oh, but, Tom!” she panted, “you–you don’t understand! you don’t know! It’s not merely the danger! It’s the dreadful thought that if you–if you should not–come back–and I hadn’t told you!”
“Told me?” he echoed in hushed wonderment as her anguished soul looked out at him through her wide eyes and he sensed the first vague foreshadowing of the truth. “You have something to tell me–your voice!–your eyes!–”
“You see it! You know me!” she gasped, and she flung herself into his arms. Straining herself to him in half frantic ecstasy, she murmured in a broken whisper: “Yes! I am–am Belle! It is wicked and selfish to tell you; but to have you go down there without first–I could not bear it! Yet I–I shall not drag you down–disgrace you. Never that! I’ll go away!.. Oh, Tom! dear Tom!”
He had stood dumfounded by the revelation of her identity. At first he could not speak; hardly could he think. His eyes stared into hers with a dazed look. But before she could finish her impassioned declaration of self-abnegation he roused from his bewilderment, and his great arms closed about her quivering body. He crushed her to him and pressed his lips upon her white forehead.
“Belle!–poor little Belle!.. But why? Tell me why? All this time, and you never showed by a single word or look!”
“I did!” she sought to defend herself from the tender reproach. “I did, but I–I was afraid to tell.”
“Afraid?”
The girl’s face flamed scarlet with shame. She sought to draw away from him. “Let me go, Tom! oh, please, let me go! I am a selfish, wicked girl! I have done it! I have done it! Now there is no help for it! She must be told–all!”
“All?” he questioned.
“Yes, all, Tom! I cannot deny Mary! She saved me! I believe she is in Heaven. She could not help doing what she did. She could not help it, Tom–and she saved me! I must give you up–go away; but I can never, never deny my sister!”
Blake swung half around with the quivering girl, and looked over her downbent head at his wife. Genevieve stood almost within arm’s-length of them. He met her gaze, and immediately pushed the girl out towards her.
“Listen, Belle,” he said. “It is all right. Here is Jenny waiting for you. She understands.”
Gowan, watching rigid and tense-lipped, with his hand clenched on the hilt of his half-drawn Colt’s, was astonished to see Mrs. Blake step forward and clasp Isobel in her arms. But Ashton did not see the strange act that checked the puncher’s vengeful shot. While the girl was yet clinging to Blake, he had turned and fled along the edge of the ravine, for the moment stark mad with rage and despair.
He rushed off without a cry, and the others were themselves far too surcharged with emotion to heed his going until he had disappeared around a turn in the ravine. When at last, almost spent with exertion, he staggered up a ridge to glare back at those from whom he had fled, his bloodshot eyes could perceive only three figures on the brink of the gorge. They were kneeling to look over into the ravine.
His thoughts were still in a wild whirl, but the heat of his mad rage had passed and left him in a cold fury. He instantly comprehended that Blake had swung over the edge and was descending the rope down the almost sheer face of the ravine wall.
Now was the time! A touch of a knife-edge to the rope, and the girl would be saved. Would Gowan think of it?.. Of course he would think of it. But he would not do it. He would leave the deed to be done by the man to whom he had relinquished Miss Chuckie. It was for that man to save her–to destroy the tempter and break the spell of fascination that was drawing her over the brink of a pit far deeper than any earthly cañon. He, Lafayette Ashton–not Gowan–was the man. He must save her–down there in the depths, where no eye could see.