When he awakened the next morning he found that the others werealready up and had prepared breakfast. The blue sky was brilliant withthe morning sun, but the little canyon was still damp and cool in theblack shadow of its walls and of the beetling mountains that toweredbeyond. Their camp was at the very head of the canyon. On two sidesthe walls reached high above them in almost perpendicular cliffs. Atthe end, the rocky barrier was more broken and was heaped withboulders, through which the clear waters of the streamlet cametrickling and gurgling and finally leaped over [Pg 132]the wall into a littlepool. The floor of the canyon was barely more than two hundred feetacross, and twice that distance below the pool the walls drew so neartogether that they formed a narrow pass. In this little oval enclosuregrew several pine trees of fairly good size, some scrub pines andcedars and other bushes, and the ground was well covered with greengrass and flowers.
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Carefully he began picking the rope with the pin, fiber by fiber, andslowly, strand by strand, the hard, twisted, weather-beaten cords gaveway and stood out on each side in stubby, frazzled ends. The pin bentand turned in his fingers, and the blood oozed from their raw ends.But he held a tight grip upon his one hope of freedom, and finally therope was so nearly separated that a sudden wrench of his body brokethe last strands. He put the bent, twisted, bloody pin carefully awayin his pocket and, stooping over, found that he could barely reach thematch on the ground. He was able to grasp also two or three dry twigsand sticks that lay near it. On the bark of the pine tree to which hewas tied were many little balls and drops of pitch. He felt over thesurface of the tree as far as he could reach and pulled off all thathe could get of this. [Pg 167]Then he found that the only part of the ropethat he could at once reach and see was that directly in front of hisbody. He turned and twisted, but there was no other way. If heattempted to burn it anywhere else he would have to guess at the bestway to hold the match, and he might waste the precious heat in whichlay his only hope.
In the late afternoon Wellesly sat beside Marguerite Delarue on herveranda and told her the story of his abduction and of his fight,which he had come so near to losing, with the fiends of heat andthirst. He showed her the bent and bloody pin which had helped toliberate him from his captivity in the canyon and in soft andlover-like tones told her that he owed his life to her and that alifetime of devotion would not be sufficient to express his gratitude.But he stopped just short of asking her to accept the lifetime ofdevotion. She was much moved and her tender blue eyes were misty withtears as she listened to the story of his sufferings. He thought hehad never seen her look so sweet and attractive and so entirely inaccord with his ideal of womanly sympathy. When he told her howEmerson Mead and his two friends had worked over him and by what anarrow margin they had saved him from severe illness and probably fromdeath, her face brightened and she seemed much pleased. She asked somequestions about Mead, and was evidently so interested in this part ofthe story that Wellesly, much to his surprise, felt a sudden impulseof personal dislike and enmity toward the big Texan. That night, as hesat at his window smoking and looking thoughtfully at the lop-sidedmoon rising over the Hermosa mountains, he was [Pg 195]thinking aboutMarguerite Delarue and the advisability of asking her to marry him.
They picked their way carefully up the canyon, watching the gorge thatlengthened beyond them and the walls that towered above their heads,listening constantly for the faintest sounds of human voice or foot,speaking rarely and always in a whisper. The floor of the canyon wasstrewn with boulders large and small, and its sides rose above them inrugged, barren, precipitous cliffs. Nowhere did they see the slightestsign of vegetation to relieve the wilderness of sand and rock andbarren walls. Not even a single grass blade thrust a brave green headbetween forbidding stones. Above them was a sky of pure, brilliantblue, and around them was the gray of the everlasting granite. Exceptfor the sound of their own footsteps, the canyon was absolutelysilent. There was no call of animals one to another, or twitter ofbirds, or whirr of feathered wings, or piping of insects. Now and[Pg 199]then a slender, graceful lizard darted silently out of the sunshineto hide beneath a stone, and far behind them in the canyon thebuzzards wheeled in low, awkward flights above the carcass of the deadhorse. But aside from these no living creature was to be seen.
She was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she did not notice theunusual abstraction of the [Pg 266]child. With one chubby fist grasping herforefinger and the other trailing, head downward, a big yellowchrysanthemum, he trudged silently by her side, his red fez making aspot of bright color against her white dress. He was wondering why hehad no mamma. Many times he had talked the matter over withMarguerite, but she had never been able to explain it to his entiresatisfaction. He accepted her statements when she made them, but asthey did not seem to him to justify the fact, she had to make them allover again the next time he thought of the subject. That day he hadvisited a little playmate who had both a big sister and a mamma, andas he walked across the mesa with Marguerite his small brain was busywith the problem and his childish heart was full of longing. He liftedhis serious, puzzled face, with its big, blue, childishly earnest eyesto his sister, who was as absorbed in her problem as was he in his. 2ff7e9595c
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