defenseless in a wilderness such as no humans ever yet had faced—all this meant nothing to Allan Stern.
For he had her; and as at last her lids twitched, then opened, and her dazed eyes looked at him; as she tried to struggle up while he restrained her; as she chokingly called his name and stretched a tremulous hand to him, there in the thunderous half light of the falls, he knew he could not ask for greater joy, though all of civilization and of power might be his, without her.
In his own soul he knew he would choose this abandonment and all this desperate peril with Beatrice, rather than safety, comfort, luxury, and the whole world as it once had been apart from her.
Yet, as sometimes happens in the supreme crises of life, his first spoken word was commonplace enough.
“There, there, lie still!” he commanded, drawing her close to his breast. “You’re all right, now—just keep quiet, Beatrice!”
“What—what’s happened—” she gasped. “Where—”
“Just a little accident, that’s all,” he soothed the frightened girl. Dazed by the roaring cadence of the torrent, she shuddered and hid her face against him; and his arms protected her as he crouched there beside her in the scant shelter of the rocky shelf.
“We got carried over a waterfall, or something of that sort,” he added. “We’re on a ledge in the river, or whatever it is, and—”
“You’re hurt, Allan?”
“No, no—are you?”
“It’s nothing, boy!” She looked up again, and even in the dim light he saw her try to smile. “Nothing matters so long as we have each other!”
Silence between them for a moment, while he drew her close and kissed her. He questioned her again, but found that save for bruises and a cruel blow on the temple, she had taken no hurt in the plunge that had stunned her. Both, they must have been flung from the yawl when it had gone to pieces. How long they had lain upon the rock they knew not. All they could know was that the light woodwork of the boat had been dashed away with their supplies and that now they again faced the world empty-handed—provided even that escape were possible from the midst of that mad torrent.
An hour or so they huddled in the shelter of the rocky shelf till strength and some degree of calm returned and till the growing light far off to eastward through the haze and mist told them that day was dawning again.
Then Allan set to work exploring once more carefully their little islet in the swirling flood.
“You stay here, Beta,” said he. “So long as you keep back of this projection you’re safe. I’m going to see just what the prospect is.”
“Oh, be careful, Allan!” she entreated. “Be so very, very careful, won’t you?”
He promised and left her. Then, cautiously, step by step, he made his way along the ledge in the other direction from that where he had found the senseless girl.
To the very end of the ledge he penetrated, but found no hope. Nothing was to be seen through the mists save the mad foam-rush of the waters that leaped and bounded like white-maned horses in a race of death. Bold as the man was, he dared not look for long. Dizziness threatened to overwhelm him with sickening lure, its invitation to the plunge. So, realizing that nothing was to be gained by staying there, he drew back and once more sought Beatrice.
“Any way out?” she asked him, anxiously, her voice sounding clear and pure through the tumult of the rushing waters.
He shook his head, despairingly. And silence fell again, and each sat thinking long, long thoughts, and dawn came creeping grayly through the spume-drive of the giant falls.
More than an hour must have passed before Stern noted a strange phenomenon—an hour in which they had said few words—an hour in which both had abandoned hopes of life—and in which, she in her own way, he in his, they had reconciled themselves to the inevitable.
But at last, “What’s that?” exclaimed the man; for now a different tone resounded in the cataract, a louder, angrier note, as though the plunge of waters at the bottom had in some strange, mysterious way drawn nearer. “What’s that?” he asked again.
Below there somewhere by the tenebrous light of morning he could see—or thought that he could see—a green, dim, vaguely tossing drive of waters that now vanished in the whirling mists, now showed again and now again grew hidden.
Out to the edge of the rocky shelf he crept once more. Yes, for a certainty, now he could make out the seething plunge of the waters as they roared into the foam-lashed flood below.
But how could this be? Stern’s wonder sought to grasp analysis of the strange phenomenon.
“If it’s true that the water at the bottom’s rising,” thought he, “then there must either be some kind of tide in that body of water or else the cavity itself must be filling up. In either case, what if the process continues?”
And instantly a new fear smote him—a fear wherein lay buried like a fly in amber a hope for life, the only hope that had yet come to him since his awakening there in that trap sealed round by sluicing maelstroms.
He watched a few moments longer, then with a fresh resolve, desperate yet joyful in its strength, once more sought the girl.
“Beta,” said he, “how brave are you?”
“How brave? Why, dear?”
He paused a moment, then replied: “Because, if what I believe is true, in a few minutes you and I have got to make a fight for life—a harder fight than any we’ve made yet—a fight that may last for hours and may, after all, end only in death. A battle royal! Are you strong for it? Are you brave?”
“Try me!” she answered, and their eyes met, and he knew the truth, that come what might of life or death, of loss or gain, defeat or victory, this woman was to be his mate and equal to the end.
“Listen, then!” he commanded. “This is our last, our only chance. And if it fails—”
CHAPTER XIII. ON THE CREST OF THE MAELSTROM
STERN’S observation of the rising flood proved correct. By whatever theory it might or might not be explained, the fact was positive that now the water there below them was rising fast, and that inside of half an hour at the outside the torrent would engulf their ledge.
It seemed as though there must be some vast, rhythmic ebb and flux in the unsounded abysses that yawned beneath them, some incalculable regurgitation of the sea, which periodically spewed forth a part, at least, of the enormous torrent that for hours poured into that titanic gulf.
And it was upon this flux, stormy and wild and full of seething whirlpools, that Allan Stern and the girl now built their only possible hope of salvation and of life.
“Come, we must be at world!” he told her, as together they peered over the edge and now beheld the weltering flood creeping up, up along the thunderous plunge of the waterfall till it was within no more than a hundred feet of their shelter.
As the depth of the fall decreased the spray-drive lessened, and now, with the full coming of day, some reflection of the golden morning sky crept through the spray. Yet neither to right nor left could they see shore or anything save that long, swift, sliding wall of brine, foam-tossed and terrible.
“To work!” said he again. “If we’re going to save ourselves out of this inferno we’ve got to make some kind of preparation. We can’t just swim and trust to luck. We shall have to malice float of some sort or other, I think.”
“Yes, but what with?” asked she.
“With what remains of the yawl!”
And even as he spoke he led the way to the crevice where the splintered boards and the torn sail had been wedged fast.
“A slim hope, I know,” he admitted, “but it’s all we’ve got now.”
Driven home as the wreckage was by the terrific impact of the blow, Stern had a man’s work cut out for
