"Get Joan!" shouted the Padre from behind. He was less swift of foot than Buck. "Get Joan! I"ll see to the other."
Buck reached the girl"s side. She had heard the explosions of the underworld and stood shaking with terror.
"We"re up agin it, Joan," he cried. And before the panic-stricken girl could reply she was in his strong young arms speeding for the downward path, which was their only hope.
"But the Padre! Aunt Mercy!" cried Joan, in a sudden recollection.
"They"re comin" behind. He"ll see to her----G.o.d in heaven!"
A deafening roar, a hundred times greater than the first explosions, came from directly beneath the man"s feet. The air was full of it. To the fugitives it was as if the whole world had suddenly been riven asunder. For one flashing moment it seemed to Buck that he had been struck with fearful force from somewhere behind him, and as the blow fell he was hurled headlong down the precipitous path.
A confused, painful sense of cruel buffeting left him only half-conscious. There was a roar in his ears like the bombardment of unearthly artillery. It filled his brain to the exclusion of all else, while he hugged the girl close in his arms with some instinct of saving her, and shielding her from the cruel blows with his own body.
Beyond that he had practically no sensation. Beyond that he had no realization whatever. They were falling, falling, and every limb in his body seemed to find the obstructions with deadly certainty. How far, how long they were falling, whither the awful journey was carrying them, these things pa.s.sed from him utterly.
Then, abruptly, all sensation ceased. The limit of endurance had been reached. For him, at least, the battle for life seemed ended. The greater forces might contest in bitter rage. Element might war with element, till the whole face of the world was changed; for Providence, in a belated mercy, had suspended animation, and spared these two poor atoms of humanity a further witness of a conflict of forces beyond their finite understanding.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
ALONE--
"Buck! Buck!"
Faint and small, the cry was lost in the wilderness of silence. It died out, a heart-broken moan of despair, fading to nothingness in the still, desolate world.
Then came another sound. It was the crash of a falling tree. It was louder, but it, too, could scarcely break the stillness, so silent was the world, so desolate was it in the absence of all life.
Day had broken. The sky was brilliant with swift-speeding clouds of fleecy white. The great sun had lifted well above the horizon, and already its warming rays were thirstily drinking from a sodden, rain-drenched earth.
The perfect calm of a summer morning reigned. Up above, high up, where it was quite lost to the desolation below, a great wind was still speeding on the fleecy storm-clouds, brushing them from its path and replacing them with the frothing scud of a glorious day. But the air had not yet regained its wonted freshness. The reek of charred timber was everywhere. It poisoned the air, and held memory whence it would willingly escape.
"Oh, Buck, speak to me! Open your eyes! Oh, my love, my dear, dear love!"
The cry had grown in pitch. It was the cry of a woman whose whole soul is yearning for the love which had been ruthlessly torn from her bosom.
Again it died away in a sob of anguish, and all was still again. Not a sound broke the appalling quiet. Not a leaf rustled, for the world seemed shorn of all foliage. Not a sound came from the insect world, for even the smallest, the most minute of such life seemed to have fled, or been destroyed. There was neither the flutter of a wing, nor the voice of the prowling carnivora, for even the winged denizens of the mountains and the haunting scavengers had fled in terror from such a wilderness of desolation.
"Buck, oh, my Buck! Speak, speak! He"s dead! Oh, my G.o.d, he"s dead!"
Louder the voice came, and now in its wail was a note of hysteria.
Fear had made harsh the velvet woman"s tones. Fear, and a rising resentment against the cruel sentence that had been pa.s.sed upon her.
She crouched down, rocking herself amidst a low scrub upon which the dead leaves still hung where the fires had scorched them. But the fire had not actually pa.s.sed over them. A wide spread of barren rock intervened between the now skeleton woods and where the girl sat huddled.
In front of her lay the figure of a man, disheveled and bleeding, and scarcely recognizable for the staunch youth who had yielded himself to the buffets of life that the woman he loved might be spared.
But Joan only saw the radiant young face she loved, the slim, graceful figure so full of life and strength. He was hers. And--and death had s.n.a.t.c.hed him from her. Death had claimed him, when all that she could ever long for seemed to be within her grasp. Death, ruthless, fierce, hateful death had crushed out that life in its cruellest, most merciless fashion.
She saw nothing of the ruin which lay about her. She had no thought of anything else, she had no thought of those others. All she knew was that her Buck, her brave Buck, lay before her--dead.
The girl suddenly turned her despairing eyes to the white heavens, their deep blue depths turned to a wonderful violet of emotion. Her wealth of golden hair hung loose about her shoulders, trailing about her on the sodden earth, where it had fallen in the midst of the disaster that had come upon her. Her rounded young figure was bent like the figure of an aged woman, and the drawn lines of anguish on her beautiful face gave her an age she did not possess.
"Oh, he is not dead!" she cried, in a vain appeal. "Tell me he is not dead!" she cried, to the limitless s.p.a.ce beyond the clouds. "He is all I have, all I have in the world. Oh, G.o.d, have mercy upon me! Have mercy!"
Her only reply was the stillness. The stillness as of death. She raised her hands to her face. There were no tears. She was beyond that poor comfort. Dry, hard sobs racked her body, and drove the rising fever to her poor brain.
For long moments she remained thus.
Then, after a while, her sobs ceased and she became quite still. She dropped her hands inertly from her face, and let them lie in her lap, nerveless, helpless, while she gazed upon the well-loved features, so pale under the grime and tanning of the skin.
She sat quite still for many minutes. It almost seemed as if the power of reason had at last left her, so colorless was her look, so unchanging was her vacant expression. But at last she stirred. And with her movement a strange light grew in her eyes. It was a look bordering upon the insane, yet it was full of resolve, a desperate resolve. Her lips were tightly compressed, and she breathed hard.
She made no sound. There were no further lamentations. Slowly she reached out one hand toward the beloved body. Nor was the movement a caress. It pa.s.sed across the tattered garments, through which the painfully contused flesh peered hideously out at her. It moved with definite purpose toward one of the gaping holsters upon the man"s waist-belt. Her hand came to a pause over the protruding b.u.t.t of a revolver. Just for a moment there was hesitation. Then it dropped upon it and her fingers clasped the weapon firmly. She withdrew it, and in a moment it rested in her lap.
She gazed down upon it with straining, hopeless eyes. It was as if she were struggling to nerve herself for that one last act of cowardice which the despairing find so hard to resist. Then, with a deep-drawn sigh, she raised the weapon with its muzzle ominously pointing at her bosom.
Again came a pause.
Then she closed her eyes, as though fearing to witness the pa.s.sing of the daylight from her life, and her forefinger moved to embrace the trigger. It reached its object, and its pressure tightened.
But as it tightened, and the trigger even moved, she felt the warm grip of a hand close over hers, and the pistol was turned from its direction with a wrench.
Her startled eyes abruptly opened, and her grip upon the weapon relaxed, while a cry broke from her ashen lips. She had left the gun in Buck"s hand, and his dark eyes were gazing into hers from his bed amongst the crushed branches of the bush amidst which he was lying.
For long moments she stared at him almost without understanding. Then, slowly, the color returned to her cheeks and lips, and great tears of joy welled up into her loving eyes.
"Buck," she murmured, as the heavy tears slowly rolled down her cheeks, and her bosom heaved with unspeakable joy. "My--my Buck."
For answer the man"s eyes smiled. Her heaven had opened at last.
CHAPTER x.x.xVIII
--IN THE WILDERNESS
The golden sun was high in the heavens. Its splendor was pouring down upon a gently steaming earth. But all its joyous light, all its perfect beneficence could not undo one particle of the havoc the long dark hours of night had wrought.
High up on a shattered eminence, where a sea of tumbled rock marked the face of Devil"s Hill, where the great hot lake had been held suspended, Joan and Buck gazed out upon the battle-ground of nature"s forces.
Presently the girl"s eyes came back to the face of her lover. She could not long keep them from the face, which, such a few hours ago, she had believed she would never behold again in life. She felt as though he were one returned to her from the grave, and feared lest she should wake to find his returning only a dream.