The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 46
CHAPTER XLVI
Sacrifice
BUT Tom Bacus hadn't failed to profit by the warning implied in Alan's accident. Alan, he told himself, would never have run his cycle at so foolhardy a pace without good reason, and under the circumstances good reason was synonymous solely with pursuit.
He was therefore on the alert, quick to see the racing automobile when it came hurtling round the bend, and in the nick of time grasped Judith's arm and swung her back with him out of harm's way.
His motor-cycle, abandoned in the middle of the road, was struck by the motor-car and flung halfway down the enbankment, a hopeless tangle of shattered tubing and twisted wire. As the collision took place, he saw Jimmy seated beside Marrophat, who drove, swing a magazine gun round and let it off at hopeful random. The bullet lodged in a tree-trunk. Judith fired in response. But her shot flew wild, and the racing-car flew on, as if on the wings of the wind.
At first blush it seemed surprising that the car did not stop. But Barcus reminded himself that Marrophat and Jimmy could not possibly have witnessed the accident involving Alan and Rose, who, together with the wreck of their machine, remained well-cloaked by the underbrush at the bottom of the cañon. The assassins had assumed that Alan had hurried on; and since their own first business was with him, they had done likewise, reasoning that they could return and deal with his unfortunate friend at their convenience after overhauling their quarry whose life they most coveted.
As for Rose and Alan—Heaven alone knew what had happened to them. But Barcus set himself to find out without delay. He sprang from the sheltering trees and, Judith at his heels, pelted headlong down the slope to the spot where the others had vanished. To find them practically unscathed affected that loyal soul almost to tears.
But when congratulations had been mutually exchanged, there fell an awkward pause. The eyes of the four sought one another's ruefully, each pair quick with the unuttered but inexorable inquiry: What next?
The road was now barred to them. At any moment the racer might return. They confronted the necessity of threading afoot a wild and mountainous country of whose geography they were absolutely ignorant. And time pressed, while the fatigue bred of their many hardships weighed heavily upon them all.
It was Barcus who advanced the suggestion which was adopted, more through lack of a better than for any appeal intrinsic in the proposition.
"When we broke down, up there," he ventured, "I saw a cañon branching off from this one about a quarter of a mile over yonder. We might stroll round that way and see what its natural attractions may be, if any. It's sure a mighty poor sort of a cañon that doesn't lead anywhere—and anyway we can't be worse off than we are, and"
"Sufficient!" Mr. Law interrupted. "Providing Rose and Judith feel equal to the effort, I'm for your suggestion."
"We must," said Judith slowly.
With a sigh, Rose nodded her agreement.
Crooking a deferential arm, Barcus offered it to Judith.
"Everything is lovely in the formal garden," he insisted; "so sweetly romantic. Are you game for an idle saunter, just to while the idle hours away?"
The woman found spirit enough for a smile as she tucked her hand gratefully beneath his arm.
"You're the cheerfulest soul I ever met," she said demurely. "What I'm going to do without you when, if ever, we get out of this awful business, goodness only knows."
"Let's talk of something else," he suggested hastily.
"Unless, of course," she pursued with unbroken gravity, "I marry you. …"
"Heaven," the young man prayed fervently "forfend!"
"That is hardly gallant"
"I mean—Heaven forfend that you should throw yourself away!"
"Humph!" she mused. "Perhaps you're right. …"
Their banter was not without a subtle object, namely to reassure the girl who followed, supported by her lover's arm.
In the course of the last twenty-four hours Rose's jealousy of her sister's new-found friendliness with Alan had become acutely evident. The least courtesy which circumstances now and again demanded that he show Judith was enough to cloud the countenance of Alan's betrothed.
Nor, indeed, was Rose altogether destitute of plausible excuse for this feeling of hers. It was undeniable that between Alan and Judith a bond of sympathy had grown out of the trials and hardships they had of late suffered in common. It was undeniable, but even in his most private thoughts Alan denied it fiercely.
That her love was hopeless, Judith knew but too well. Even though Alan might not be altogether indifferent to her, his loyalty to Rose was unshakable. And not for worlds would Rose's rival have had it otherwise. She could not have loved him as she did had he not been so immovably true. As it was, since she could not hope her love might ever be returned, she was content to love and to promise herself that, if opportunity offered, she would not prove unready to sacrifice herself to her love. At times she caught herself praying that such opportunity would soon be accorded her, and that the sacrifice it should demand would be complete. …
Now prayers are sometimes answered when the craved boon is good for the soul. …
Slowly and painfully these four toiled along an obscure trail. Above them, on the road they had abandoned, the crimson racer doubled back to the point where it had passed Judith and Barcus; its occupants descended, explored, and came presently upon the trail of the fugitives.
Bloodhounds could not have settled down upon a scent with more good-will and eagerness than Mr. Marrophat and his faithful aide. The sun was high above the cañon when the pursuit came within rifle-shot of the chase.
The spiteful crack roused the quartet from a pause of dismay due to tardy appreciation of the fact that they had penetrated almost to the end of a blind alley. According to Mr. Barcus's definition, in short, this was indeed a mighty poor sort of a cañon, since it proved to lead nowhither; its head was a wall of rock around three hundred feet in height, closing the end of a traplike chasm.
A trap, indeed, now that the report of the rifle advised them that their retreat was cut off!
A hasty council of war armed Alan with Judith's revolver and posted him behind a boulder commanding the approaches to the chasm. The weapon, a powerful .45, had a range sufficient to numb the impetuosity of the assassins and keep them under cover and out of sight of the desperate essays the fugitives were making to compass an escape.
For in the shed behind an abandoned log-cabin—souvenir, no doubt, of some long-forgotten prospector—Barcus had unearthed a length of stout rope. He had hacked this into two equal lengths. One of these lengths he proceeded to make fast round his own waist, then round Rose's. The other he left to be similarly employed by Alan and Judith. For it was agreed that they must climb, and while the cliff offered no problem to daunt a skilled mountain-climber, it was considered best that the fugitives should be hitched up in pairs against any possibility of a slip. The manner of the pairing had been determined by the fact that Barcus boasted some experience in mountaineering, while Rose was plainly the most exhausted of the two women, the least able to help herself in an emergency.
He had worked his way, with the girl in tow, to a point about midway up the face of the cliff, following a long diagonal that provided the easiest climbing, when Alan stole back to Judith and reported that he was convinced that the pursuit had turned back—perhaps for want of ammunition. Without delay, then, following the way Barcus had chosen, he and Judith began the ascent.
Two thirds of the climb had been accomplished, and Rose and Barcus had arrived in safety at the top, before the temptation to look down proved irresistible to Alan. Immediately beneath his heels the face of the cliff was deeply hollowed out, leaving a drop of fifty feet to a shelving ledge of shale as steep as a roof, whose eaves—perhaps another fifty feet below—jutted out over another fall of a hundred feet. Alan shuddered and swallowed hard before resuming the ascent.
Another twenty feet, however, brought him to a ledge quite six feet wide, offering a broad and easy path to the summit. He gained this with a prayer of heartfelt relief, and was on the point of rising to his feet when a scream of terror from Rose, watching over the upper edge, warned him in time to enable him to snatch and grasp a knob of rock before Judith's weight suddenly tautened the rope between them and jerked Alan's legs from under him.
His feet and legs kicking the empty air beyond the 
THE STRUGGLE WAS SHORT, TERRIFIC; ALAN, ROSE, AND BARCUS FOUND THEMSELVES CAPTIVES.
JUDITH WAS LIMP AS THEY DRAGGED HER FROM THE SEA.
The fall of twenty feet to the shale roof was nothing. What would follow would, however, spell death. The impact of her body would set the shale in motion, like an avalanche—and beyond the eaves was only emptiness and the boulder-strewn bed of the chasm, a hundred feet below!
The sweat poured from his face like rain. His eyes started in their sockets. The blood drummed in his ears. His fingers grew numb, his throat dry. He felt that he could not hold on another instant, when, abruptly, that torture was no more. The rope had been relieved of its burden. He heard a scream from above, then the thump of Judith's body falling on the shale, then the slithering rumble of the landslide gathering momentum …
Barcus at length arrived, and assisted him to a place of security. Spent and faint and sick with horror, he lay prone, shuddering.
Only the assurance of Barcus that Judith had somehow escaped being precipitated over the eaves of the shale roof gave him nerve enough to resume the climb. It was true, she lay within three yards of the brink, unstirring. She dared not stir—a single movement would set the shale bed again in motion.
Alan understood that, as Barcus asserted, she had deliberately cut the rope herself—and offered up her life to spare his own. …
A broad roadway ran along the top of the precipice, turning off, at a little distance to the right, to descend the mountainside. And just beyond this turning Providence had chosen to locate the camp of an hydraulic mining outfit.
Alan's appearance at the top, in fact, was coincident with the arrival at the point of half a dozen excited miners; and he had no more than voiced his demands than three of their number were hastening to procure rope and more hands. Within five minutes Alan was being lowered over the edge and down to the shale roof, on which he landed at a spot far to one side of Judith, to escape all danger of sending a second landslide down upon her.
Picking his way carefully, Alan edged along the brink, more than once saved from falling by the rope, until he stood immediately below Judith. There pausing, he tossed the end of the rope into her hands, and when she had wound it twice around her arms, crept up to her side and helped her make it fast about her body.
His signal to the miners that all was well educed prompt response. There was a giddy interval in which the two swung perilously between heaven and earth. Then they stood once more in safety.
Supported by sympathetic hands, the quartet staggered into camp, their story, as condensed by Barcus and breathlessly confirmed by Alan, already winning them enthusiastic champions. And this was well; for in a few moments the rumble of a motor-car sounded beyond the shoulder of the hill.
A startled question elicited the information that the cliff road was only a continuation of the road they had abandoned in the cañon. The approaching car, then, could hardly be any other than that which was freighted with the men who had so long sought the death of Alan and his friend.
Startled into command of his faculties, Alan rose, took quick cognizance of such faculties for defence as the camp afforded, and issued his instructions.
Not far from the point where the road swung from the cliff to thread the camp the hydraulic nozzle was in action, its terrific force of water melting the mountainside away ton by ton. Toward this Barcus ran at top speed, gaining the men in charge of the nozzle just as the car swung round the bend.
Pausing only long enough to make certain that there could be no mistake, and having this certainty made doubly sure by Jimmy's action in rising from his seat and firing an ill-aimed revolver at Alan, Barcus and the miner swung the nozzle round until it bore directly on the car.
The power of its stream was so great that the car was checked in its tracks; and before the water could have been shut off or the stream diverted, the machine was driven back to the very lip of the cliff and over it, taking with it those twain upon whose efforts the hope of Seneca Trine of late had been centred. A death that was merciful, in that it was instantaneous, awaited them at the foot of the cliff.