"I was running away--I could not bear it. I think I must have been crazy for a time. If only I had heard! My God! if only I had heard!"
"Well, you know now," said Blake. "What's done is done. The question now is, what are you going to do next?"
Instantly Ashton's drooping figure was a-quiver with eagerness.
"You wish first to be taken up near the driftwood," he exclaimed. "Let me lift you. Don't be afraid to put your weight on me. Hurry! We must lose no time!"
Blake was already struggling up. Ashton strained to help him rise erect on his sound leg. Braced and half lifted by the younger man, the engineer hobbled and hopped along the barrier crest and up its sloping side. His trained eye picked out a great weather-seasoned pine log lying directly beneath the outermost point of the cañon rim. An object dropped over where the flag still flecked against the indigo sky, would have fallen straight down to the log, unless deflected by the prong of a ledge that jutted out twelve hundred feet from the top.
"Here," panted Blake, regardless of the great pile of skeletons heaped on the far end of the log. "This place--right below them! Go back--bring fire and rope."
Ashton ran back to fetch the rope and a dozen blazing sticks. Driftwood was strewn all around. In a minute he had a fire started against the butt end of the log. He began to gather a pile of fuel. But Blake checked him with a cheerful--"That's enough, old man. I can manage now. Take the rope, and go."
When Ashton had coiled the rope over his shoulder and under the opposite arm, he came and stood before his prostrate companion. His face was scarlet with shame.
"I have been a fool--and worse," he said. "I doubted her. I am utterly unfit to live. If I were alone down here, I would stay and rot. But you are her brother. If it is possible to get up there, I am going up."
"You are going up!" encouraged Blake. "You will make it. Give my love to them. Tell them I'm doing fine."
"No," said Ashton. "I'd give anything if I could grip hands with you. But I cannot. You are her brother. I am unfit to touch your hand."
He turned and ran up the precipice-foot to the first steep ascent of the steeple-sloped break in the wall of the abyss.
A day of anxiety, only partly relieved by those tiny flashes of light so far, far down in the awful depths; then the long night of ceaseless watching. Neither Genevieve nor Isobel had been able to sleep during those hours when no flash signaled up to them from the abysmal darkness.