Aldous saw no more then. He was not fighting for his life, but for her, and he fought with the mad ferocity of a tiger. As he struck, and choked, and beat the head of his assailant on the rock, he heard shriek after shriek come from Joanne's lips; and then for a flash he saw them again, and Joanne was struggling in the arms of Quade!
He struggled to his knees, and the man he was fighting struggled to his knees; and then they came to their feet, locked in a death-grip on the edge of the chasm. From Quade's clutch he saw Joanne staring at Mortimer FitzHugh; then her eyes shot to him, and with another shriek she fought to free herself.
For thirty seconds of that terrible drama Mortimer FitzHugh stood as if hewn out of rock. Then he sprang toward the fighters.
In the arms of John Aldous was the strength of ten men. He twisted the head of his antagonist under his arm; he braced his feet--in another moment he would have flung him bodily into the roaring maelstrom below. Even as his muscles gathered themselves for the final effort he knew that all was lost. Mortimer FitzHugh's face leered over his shoulder, his demoniac intention was in his eyes before he acted. With a cry of hatred and of triumph he shoved them both over the edge, and as Aldous plunged to the depths below, still holding to his enemy, he heard a last piercing scream from Joanne.
As the rock slid away from under his feet his first thought was that the end had come, and that no living creature could live in the roaring maelstrom of rock and, flood into which he was plunging. But quicker than he dashed through space his mind worked. Instinctively, without time for reasoning, he gripped at the fact that his one chance lay in the close embrace of his enemy. He hung to him. It seemed to him that they turned over and over a hundred times in that distance of fifty feet. Then a mass of twisting foam broke under him, and up out of it shot the head of one of the roaring monsters of rock that he and Joanne had looked upon. They struck it fairly, and Aldous was uppermost. He felt the terrific impact of the other's body. The foam boiled upward again, and they slipped off into the flood.
Still Aldous held to his enemy. He could feel that he was limp now; he no longer felt the touch of the hands that had choked him, or the embrace of the arms that had struggled with him. He believed that his antagonist was dead. The fifty-foot fall, with the rock splitting his back, had killed him. For a moment Aldous still clung to him as they sank together under the surface, torn and twisted by the whirling eddies and whirlpools. It seemed to him that they would never cease going down, that they were sinking a vast distance.