give or to take, besides she might be alive, she might need him. There must be some other way.
Determining upon action, his resolution rose dominant, his vision cleared. Once again he forced himself to look over the edge and see other things than she. He was a daring, skillful and experienced mountaineer; in a way mountaineering was his trade. He searched the side of the cañon to the right and the left with eager scrutiny and found no way within the compass of his vision to the depths below. He shut his eyes and concentrated his thoughts to remember what they had passed over that morning. There came to him the recollection of a place which as he had viewed it he had idly thought might afford a practicable descent to the river's rim.
Forgetful of the patient animal beside him, he rose to his feet and with one last look at the poor object below started on his wild plunge down the trail over which some men might scarcely have crept on hands and knees. Sweat bedewed his forehead, his limbs trembled, his pulses throbbed, his heart beat almost to bursting. Remorse sharpened by love, passion quickened by despair, scourged him, desperate, on the way. And God protected him also, or he had fallen at every uncertain, hurried, headlong step.
And as he ran, thoughts, reproaches, scourged him on. Why had he brought her, why had he allowed her to take that trail which but for him and for her had probably not been traversed by man or woman or beast, save the mountain sheep, the gray wolves, or the grizzly bear, for five hundred years. She had protested that she was as good a mountaineer as he – and it was true – and she had insisted on accompanying him; he recollected that there had been a sort of terror in her urgency, – he must take her, he must not leave her alone, she had pleaded; he had objected, but he had yielded, the joy of her companionship had meant so much to him in his lonely journeying, and now – he accused himself bitterly as he surged onward.
After a time the man forced himself to observe the road, he discovered that in an incredibly short period, perhaps an hour, he had traversed what it had taken them four times as long to pass over that very day. He must be near his goal. Ah, there it was at last, and in all the turmoil and torture of his brain he found room for a throb of satisfaction when he came upon the broken declivity. Yes, it did afford a practicable descent; some landslide centuries back had made there a sort of rude, rough, broken, megalithic stairway in the wall of the cañon. The man threw himself upon it and with bleeding hands, bruised limbs and torn clothing descended to the level of the river.
Two atoms to the eye of the Divine, in that vast rift in the gigantic mountains. One unconscious, motionless, save for faint gasping breaths; the other toiling blindly along the river bank, fortunately here affording practicable going, to the foot of the great butte upon whose huge shoulder the other lay. The living and the dead in the waste and the wilderness of the everlasting hills.
Unconsciously but unerringly the man had fixed the landmarks in his mind before he started on that terrific journey. Without a moment of incertitude, or hesitation, he proceeded directly to the base of the butte and as rapidly as if he had been fresh for the journey and the endeavor. Up he climbed without a pause for rest. It was a desperate going, almost sheer at times, but his passion found the way. He clawed and tore at the rocks like an animal, he performed feats of strength and skill and determination and reckless courage marvelous and impossible under less exacting demands. Somehow or other he got to the top at last; perhaps no man in all the ages since the world's first morning when God Himself upheaved the range had so achieved that goal.
The last ascent was up a little stretch of straight rock over which he had to draw himself by main strength and determination. He fell panting on the brink, but not for a moment did he remain prone; he got to his feet at once and staggered across the plateau which made the head of the butte toward the blue object on the further side beneath the wall of the cliff above, and in a moment he bent over what had been – nay, as he saw the slow choking uprise of her breast, what was – his wife.
He knelt down beside her and looked at her for a moment, scarce daring to touch her. Then he lifted his head and flung a glance around the cañon as if seeking help from man. As he did so he became aware, below him on the slope, of the dead body of the poor animal she had been riding, whose misstep, from whatever cause he would never know, had brought this catastrophe upon them.
Nothing else met his gaze but the rocks, brown, gray, relieved here and there by green clumps of stunted pine. Nothing met his ear except far beneath him the roar of the river, now reduced almost to a murmur, with which the shivering leaves of aspens, rustled by the gentle breeze of this glorious morning, blended softly like a sigh of summer. No, there was nobody in the cañon, no help there. He threw his head back and stretched out his arms toward the blue depths of the heavens above, to the tops of the soaring peaks, and there was nothing there but the eternal silence of a primeval day.
"God! God!" he murmured again in his despair.
It was the final word that comes to human lips in the last extremity when life and its hopes and its possibilities tremble on the verge. And no answer came to this poor man out of that vast void.
He bent to the woman again. What he saw can hardly be described. Her right arm and her left leg were bent backward and under her. They were shattered, evidently. He was afraid to examine her and yet he knew that practically every other bone in her body was broken as well. Her head fell lower than her shoulders, the angle which she made with the uneven rock on which she lay convinced him that her back was broken too. Her clothing was rent by her contact with the rocky spur above, it was torn from the neck downward, exposing a great red scar which ran across her sweet white young breast, blood oozing from it, while in the middle of it something yellow and bright gleamed in the light. Her cheek was cut open, her glorious hair, matted, torn and bloody, was flung backward from her down-thrown head.
She should have been dead a thousand times, but she yet lived, she breathed, her ensanguined bosom rose and fell. Through her pallid lips bloody foam bubbled, she was still alive.
The man must do something. He did not dare to move her body, yet he took off his hat, folded it, lifted her head tenderly and slipped it underneath; it made a better pillow than the hard rock, he thought. Then he tore his handkerchief from his neck and wiped away the foam from her lips. In his pocket he had a flask of whiskey, a canteen of water that hung from his shoulder somehow had survived the rough usage of the rocks. He mingled some of the water with a portion of the spirit in the cup of the flask and poured a little down her throat. Tenderly he took his handkerchief again, and wetting it laved her brow. Except to mutter incoherent prayers again and again he said no word, but his heart was filled with passionate endearments, he lavished agonized and infinite tenderness upon her in his soul.
By and by she opened her eyes. In those eyes first of all he saw bewilderment, and then terror and then anguish so great that it cannot be described, pain so horrible that it is not good for man even to think upon it. Incredible as it may seem, her head moved, her lips relaxed, her set jaw unclenched, her tongue spoke thickly.
"God!" she said.
The same word that he had used, that final word that comes to the lips when the heart is wrung, or the body is racked beyond human endurance. The universal testimony to the existence of the Divine, that trouble and sometimes trouble alone, wrings from man. No human name, not even his, upon her lips in that first instant of realization!
"How I – suffer," she faltered weakly.
Her eyes closed again, the poor woman had told her God of her condition, that was all she was equal to. Man and human relationships might come later. The man knelt by her side, his hands upraised.
"Louise," he whispered, "speak to me."
Her eyes opened again.
"Will," the anguished voice faltered on, "I am – broken – to pieces – kill me. I can't stand – kill me" – her voice rose with a sudden fearful appeal – "kill me."
Then the eyes closed and this time they did not open, although now he overwhelmed her with words, alas, all he had to give her. At last his passion, his remorse, his love, gushing from him in a torrent of frantic appeal awakened her again. She looked him once more in the face and once more begged him for that quick relief he alone could give.
"Kill me."
That was her only plea. There has been One and only One,