Out Of The Depths Part 37

"What do you mean?"

"If you want to go it alone, I can't stop you," replied the puncher.

"Needn't think I'm sucking around you for any favors or friendship. If this was my range, I would run you off it so fast you'd reach Stockchute with your tongue hanging out like a dog's. That's how much I like you."

"The feeling is fully reciprocated, I a.s.sure you," rejoined Ashton.

"All right. Now what're we going to do about him?--each play a lone hand, or make it pardners for this deal?"

"I--fail to understand," hesitated Ashton.

"No, you don't," jeeringly contradicted the puncher. "It's a three-cornered fight. You see it now, even if you have been too big a fool to see it before. We can settle ours after. But I'm free to own up to it that you're a striped skunk if you won't work with me first to get rid of him. Look at him now--and him married!"

Ashton's flush deepened to purple. "Married!--yes, married!" he choked out.

"Right alongside his wife, too!" Gowan thrust the goad deeper. "You'd think even that brand of skunk would have more decency. Not that his wife is any friend of mine, like she is yours. But for a man with such a wife and baby ... with Miss Chuckie! The--"

Gowan ended with a string of oaths so virulent that even Ashton's half-mad anger was checked.

"You may be--er--I fear that we--Perhaps it's not so bad as it appears!" he stammered.

"_Bah!_" disgustedly sneered the puncher, and he strode on ahead, leaving Ashton torn between rage and doubt and terror of his own furious jealousy.

The others continued to stand on a flat ledge that here formed the lip of the canon. Genevieve was trembling with awed delight. Her husband and the girl appeared more calm, but they were drinking in the grandeur of the tremendous gorge below them with no less intense appreciation of its gloomy vastness.

Upstream, to their left, the precipices jutted so far out from each wall of the canon that they overlapped, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet from the top. But downstream the upper part of the chasm flared to a width that permitted the noonday sun to penetrate part way down through the blue-black shadows.

"O-o-o-oh!" sighed Genevieve, for the tenth time, and she clung tighter than ever to the strong arm of her husband. "Isn't it fearfully, fearfully delightful? It makes the soles of my feet tingle to look at it!"

"That tickly feeling!" exclaimed Isobel. "I often ride up here to the canon, I do so love to feel that way! Only with me it's like ants crawling up and down my back."

"O-o-o-oh!" again sighed Genevieve. "It--it so overpowers one!"

"It's sure some canon," admitted her husband. "That French artist Dore ought to have seen it."

"If only we had a copy of Dante's Inferno to read here on the brink!"

she whispered.

"It always reminds me of Coleridge's poem," murmured Isobel, and she quoted in an awed whisper:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to the sunless sea.

"Fortunately for us, this is a canon, not a string of measureless caverns," said Blake. "It can be measured, one way or another. If I had a transit, I could calculate the depth at any point where the water shows--triangulate with a vertical angle. But it would cause a long delay to send on for a transit. We shall first try to chain down at that gulch break."

Genevieve shrank back from the verge of the precipice and drew the others after her.

"Dear!" she exclaimed, "I did not dream it was so fearful. One has to see to realize! You will not go down--promise me you will not go down!"

"Now, now, little woman," reproached Blake. "What's become of my partner?"

"But baby--? If you should leave him fatherless!"

"Better that than for him to have a father who is a quitter! Just wait, Sweetheart. That break looks much less overwhelming than these sheer cliffs. You know I shall not attempt anything foolhardy. If it is not possible to get down without too great risk, I shall give it up and send for a transit."

"Oh, will you?" exclaimed Isobel, hardly less apprehensive than his wife. "Why not wait anyway until you can send for your transit?"

"Because I cannot triangulate the bottom within half a mile upstream from where the tunnel would have to be located. That roar and the wildness of the water wherever we can see it is proof that it is flowing down a heavy grade. At the point where I triangulated it might be above the level of Dry Mesa, and way below the mesa here at the tunnel site."

"You could triangulate at the first place where the bottom can be seen, beyond here," suggested Genevieve.

"Suppose it proved to be lower than Dry Mesa, wouldn't that still leave us up in the air?" he asked. "Like this--"

He pulled out his notebook and drew a rough sketch.

[Transcriber's Note: an ill.u.s.tration showing "Elevation of bench-mark at foot of chute in Dry Fork Gulch" appears in the text here.]

"I see, Dear," said his wife. "When do you plan to go down?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"Can you wait until we come up from the ranch?"

"Yes. Mr. Knowles will no doubt be back by then. He can bring you out early."

"We shall come early, anyway," said Isobel.

"Of course!" added Genevieve. She drew a deep breath. "I shall see the place before you attempt to descend."

Her husband nodded rea.s.suringly and looked around to where Gowan and Ashton stood waiting, several yards from one another.

"About lunch time, isn't it?" he remarked. "Mr. Gowan will wish to be starting soon to bring up his second load."

At the suggestion, the ladies hastened to spread out their own lunch and the one brought by Blake. When called by Isobel, Gowan came forward to join the party, with rather less than his usual reserve in his speech and manner.

Ashton was the last to seat himself on the springy cushion of brown pine needles, and he sat throughout the meal in moody silence. Blake and the ladies attributed this to the fatigue of working through the long hot morning while suffering from his unhealed wound. He repulsed the sympathetic attentions of the Blakes. But he could not long continue to resist the kindly concern of the girl. After lunch she made him lie down in the shade while she bathed his wound with a good part of the small supply of water remaining in the canteens.

Gowan had been asking questions about the work. Blake explained at some length why he considered it necessary not only to descend into the canon but to carry the line of levels down along the bed of the subterranean stream to this point opposite Dry Fork Gulch. When Isobel drew apart with Ashton the puncher did not look at them, though his eyes narrowed to slits and his mouth straightened.

"You sh.o.r.e have nerve to tackle it, Mr. Blake," he commented.

"Everything alive that I know of that's ever gone down into Deep Canon hasn't ever come up again, except it had wings."

"We'll prove that the rule has an exception," replied Blake, smiling away the reawakened apprehension of his wife.

Gowan shook his head doubtfully, and strolled down the slope to peer into the canon. The level was directly in his path, set up firmly on its tripod, about six feet from the brink. The puncher stopped beside it to squint through the telescope.

"You'll have one--peach of a time seeing anything through this contraption down there," he remarked. "I can't see even right here in the sun."

"The telescope is out of focus," explained Blake. "Turn that screw on the side." Gowan twisted a protruding thumbscrew. "Not that--the one above it," directed Blake.

"Can't stop to fool now," replied the puncher. "I've got to hustle along."