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THE TRAIL THRU THE HILLS
117
But to the surprise of the conquerors, Trixie turned about with a single backward look and cantered away again. This puzzled them for a moment. Then they hurried on, anxious to reach camp and break the triumphant but sad news. For in the Indian's hand they had found Harry Livingstone's knife, cloyed with blood! There was one in camp, they knew, who would scarcely survive the news.
The pinto returned to the scene of the combat and waited, giving an occasional whinny, perhaps thus expressing her impatience or anxiety. She grazed up and down the ledge, going so close to its edge at times that overhanging turf gave way under her hoofs. Thus several hours passed. One circumstance espe■c i a 1 ly annoyed the faithful animal — the long lariat attached to the saddle horn had fallen to the ground and was 1) e i n g dragged along, sometimes under her feet, again catching in stones and shrubs. At length it quietly slipped over the edge of the gulch, dangling down for fifty feet, and frightening wild birds in their eyries and serpents in their lairs as it swished past.
Harry Livingstone had fallen headlong to a narrow ledge, forty feet below. This circumstance had saved his life for the nonce, altho his leg had been broken by the fall. When he came to his senses, it was in a world of writhing, almost insuffer
HARRY REACHES EAGERLY FOR THE DANGLING ROPE
able pain. The peril of his position was as nothing compared with his agony. His calls were upon God to have mercy, rather than upon man to save him. To be free from the rack of pain was his one thought, and if the impulse to roll off to eternity had once crossed his enfevered mind, he would have, complied. Amidst the most excruciating tortures he succeeded in half binding both the wound and the broken limb in such a way that pain abated some and came in whirling throbs, leaving short, panting intervals of comprehension. During these he patched together in ragged fragments the episodes of the day. "Maryi| he muttered feebly. "Mary!" That was the sum of it all. For he saw how hopeless was his fate thrust out on a ledge, helpless, between sky and eternity, to become the food of hungry vultures, perhaps before night!
When the lariat came dangling along it seemed but a tantalizing figment of a fevered dream. Then hope and endless waiting for it to come near filled him with new fears and tortures. He tried to cry out to his rescuer, but his voice died in his dry throat. He waited what seemed days, weeping, praying and cursing by turns, now almost swooning as he writhed in a new twinge of suffocating pain. When the rope did come within reach, his hands had begun to stiffen, and it slowly was moving past.