ZEKIEL BIRDSONG'S second man-sized miracle, sent a certain thrill of conviction down Lassiter's spine. Against all probabilities, the colporteur had found a method of descent. It began really to look as if circumstance molded itself around the fellow's convenience. This upset the Stendill agent in an odd manner.
Indeed, one may generalize and say that miracles are abhorrent to humanity at large. The inexplicable wears a sinister countenance. It is abhorrent because a human being is essentially a calculating creature, and a miracle connotes an incalculable power. All primitive religious rites are efforts to placate that power to regularity.
Later human sophistication added a moral tinge to religion. That is to say, Man promises to exercise stability of character if he can rely upon the Deity to use the same self control. The relation thus becomes contractual and both parties are bound. By dint of setting a good example before Heaven, modern clergymen have almost entirely suppressed the miraculous. They have regularized the pantheon—almost.
At any rate they have been so successful that a certain school of men has sprung up who claim there never was and there never will be such a thing as a miracle. This, of course, is not only folly, it is ingratitude. They do not consider the trouble the sacerdotes have taken to suppress these aberrations.
These scientists claim to believe in law. Smite a scientist with a miracle and he clings with a sort of pathetic trust, that it all happened through law—an unknown law, that would work ex post facto if ever discovered. This, surely, is madness. Laws are not allowed to work ex post facto; the United States Supreme Court is very clear on that point.
Scientists may justly be called a sect of men exercising blind faith and wilful disregard of the truth against all the canons of reason. Yet among them may be found many lovable and child-like characters.
However, Lassiter was not a scientist. He had no such sustaining faith in a mythical law. He was a hard-headed financial agent, a promoter, an opportunist, who seized on the passing face of circumstance and made the most of it. He acknowledged a miracle grudgingly when he saw one.
And this was a miracle, this rope leading down into emptiness. In an effort at rational explanation, his brain attacked the problem with rat-like persistence. Even if the rope had been of the most ordinary human origin, the probability that the expedition would have stumbled upon it was remote—but for a horseman to bring a lariat, glue it to the cliff and disappear thus leaving Birdsong a mode of
Lassiter stared around the vast burnt pass up which he had clambered; the enormous scarp of the volcano became tinged with a nightmarish quality.
Ezekiel Birdsong, on the other hand, was not even curious about what his comrades were investigating. He accepted it as a matter of fact. He simply said to the
“Praise the Lord, Brother Nunes, you've found the way down.” Then he walked to the edge and sized up the situation from a mechanical point of view and
“We'll have to tie loops on these bundles and slide 'em down. I can't climb back for every pack.”
Nunes and Birdsong cut up the harness of the dead mules to make traveling loops for the packs. Lassiter sat and smoked and tried to Euclidize the problem before him.
The man who killed their mules escaped by means of this rope. He did not use a flying-machine. The theory of a wonderfully advanced civilization was probably false.
The assailant probably came up out of the abyss—with his horse. Killed the mules and retreated back into it—with his horse? Was dragging a dead mule to the abyss—what for? Was mule an article of diet down
The Stendill agent flung away his cigar. He was getting nowhere.
At this moment Nunes looked up from his work on the loops.
“I don't see how Señor Lassiter will climb down if the precipice gives him the vertigo?”
Mere thought of such a climb threw the promotor into a sort of panic. He began casting about for objections.
“How'll we get out after we get in?”
“Ride out, señor, just as the man did who killed our mules.”
“Ride up this precipice?”
“Señor, you know the man did not ride out up this cliff. He came out by some trail to attack us, and slid down the rope quickly because I was firing at him.”
This was a more nearly reasonable explanation than Lassiter's own.
“How did he know we were just here?”
“No doubt he saw our camp-fire last night.”
Lassiter thought up another objection.
“I'm afraid that rope won't hold us. It's merely glued to the stone. That's all—a little pat of glue.”