From the heights above Connie saw the sneaking figures as they crouched low against the edge of the dark spruces and at once divined their murderous object. For an instant she was paralyzed with terror. Her lips refused to move and her limbs grew numb.
The men moved cautiously as they approached their intended victim, fearing that he might be armed. As Hand saw Donald suspended over the river a look of fiendish elation crossed his features. Here was a chance to dispose of his enemy with no trace of the crime. He tore a fire-axe from the wall of the tool-house and ran to the swaying cable.
The Breed heard Connie’s piercing scream of terror above the sound of crashing waters. He glanced up to see her silhouetted against the blue sky, her arms waving frantically.
Screaming again, she plunged straight down the hillside in a mad race to reach the scene of action. Running like a deer, stumbling and falling, her breath coming in short gasps, she ran wildly on. Snarls of the thorny crab-apple tore at her, devil’s-club lacerated her face and hands, but she felt no pain. “O God,” she prayed aloud, “help me save him! Help me save him!”
Donald’s face blanched at the sound of the axe as it bit into the heavy wire cable. He looked down at the jagged rocks and seething waters below. Then with closed eyes and a prayer on his lips he tore in mad frenzy at the rope. Desperately he tugged with both hands, although the pain from his broken wrist sent a wave of torment up his arm that sickened him.
No man can measure the speed of thought in a crisis; even the sluggish brain of the Breed functioned rapidly. Connie was not for him. Her happiness was bound up in the man working feverishly at the haul-back. There was not one chance in a million that he would gain the safety of the cliff before the strands parted to plunge him to eternity. As he heard the crashing of Connie’s slender body as she tore down the hill, a softness crept into his eyes. With a speed incredible in one with his pitiful deformity, he ran in a series of bounding steps to the edge of the bluff. The noise of tumbling waters drowned the sound of his approach. Just as Hand raised his axe for the final blow, the muscular arms of the Breed were flung about him. Emitting a startled curse, the big man turned and with a twist of his powerful shoulders flung his dusky assailant to the ground. As he rose Hand swung viciously at him with the axe.