The Mountain Divide - Frank H. Spearman (english reading book .txt) 📗

to escape a blow on the head that would have dazed a bullock. But Dancing realized the instant he received the blow that Seagrue had delivered it.

He whirled like a wounded bear and sprang at Seagrue, taking upon his shoulder a second 273 blow hardly less terrific than the first. Before Seagrue could strike again, Dancing was upon him. Tearing at each other’s throats the two men struggled, each trying to free his right arm. Seagrue was borne steadily backward. Then the lineman’s big arm shot upward and down like a trip-hammer and Seagrue sunk limp to the ground.

The vigilantes themselves, profiting by the momentary diversion, got away. Bucks had seen the peril of being separated from their friends, but he was powerless to avert it. As Dancing struck Seagrue down, his enemies closed in behind the moving vigilantes. Bucks fought his way to the lineman’s side and in another instant the two were beset. Dancing, hard-pressed, made a dash to break through the circle to liberty. Half a dozen men sprang at him, and trampling Bucks completely under foot aimed their blows at his defender.

Dancing saw Bucks fall and, clubbing his way to his side, caught Bucks from the ground by the coat collar, and dragging him with his left 274 hand, swung with his right hand his deadly club. Nothing less would have saved them. The fight, moving every instant after Dancing, reached the broad wooden steps leading from the jail yard to the street. Down these the lineman, stubborn and bleeding, drove a desperate way. And Bucks, able again to handle himself, was putting up a good fight when, to his horror, Dancing, fighting down the flight of steps, stumbled and fell.

Half a dozen men, with a yell, jumped for him. Bucks thought the finish had come. He sprang into the fight and, armed only with a wagon spoke, cracked right and left wherever he could reach a head. Dancing he had given over for dead, when to his astonishment the lineman rose out of the heap about him, shaking off his enemies like rats.

Flames shooting up from the burning jail lighted the scene. Dancing, bare-headed, and with only a part of his shirt hanging in ribbons from his left arm, his hair matted in blood across his forehead and his eyes blazing, was a formidable sight. He had lost his club but he was at no loss for a weapon. It was said of Bill Dancing in later 275 days that he could lift a thirty-foot steel rail. Bucks saw him now catch up a man scrambling in front of him and swing him by the legs like a battering ram. With this victim, he mowed down men like corks, and, flinging the man at last bodily into the faces of his friends, he started like a deer up Cliff Street with Bucks at his heels.

Sure that they now had him, the rioters followed in a swarm. Cliff Street, only a block long and only half-opened, terminated then at the cliffs above the gorge of the Medicine River. But darkness under the brow of the hill helped the fleeing railroad men. Dancing dodged in and out of the undergrowth that fringed the street line and eluding his pursuers reached the brow of the cliff unseen. The rioters, knowing that no escape lay in that direction, beat the bushes that fringed the half-opened street, confident that the fugitives were in hiding among them.

For an ordinary man, indeed, there was no escape toward the river. A wall of rock fell a hundred feet to the water’s edge. The crowd, growing every moment as the word passed that 276 Dancing was whipped, left the hunted man and his companion little time for decision. Dancing, in truth, needed but little. His purpose was fixed the instant he saw himself cut off from every other chance. He halted only on the brink of the precipice itself. Catching Bucks’s arm, he told him hurriedly what they must do and cautioned him. “It’s the last chance, sonny,” he murmured, as his iron fingers gripped the boy’s arm. “We can make it––if you do exactly as I tell you.”

The gathering cries closed in behind them while they were taking off their shoes. Creeping on his hands and knees along the brow of the cliff, Dancing felt out his location with his fingers. And with that sixth sense of instinct which rises to a faculty when dangers thicken about a resolute man, the lineman found what he sought.

He caught at the root of a rock-bound cedar, swung himself over the cliff, and called to Bucks to follow. Bucks acted wholly on faith. The blackness below was impenetrable, and perhaps better so, since he could not see what he was 277 undertaking. Only the roar of the river came up from the depths. It sounded a little ominous as Bucks, grasping the cedar root, swung over and after an agonizing instant felt a support for his feet. He stood on a ledge of rock so narrow that it gave only a footing even in daylight, but Bucks was called on to descend it in the middle of the night.

For any man to have attempted the feat seemed to him, the next morning, sheer insanity. Dancing, however, knew the treacherous face of the river wall. To his gigantic size and strength he united the sureness of a cat in climbing up or down a mountain arête. Often he had crept with a telegraph wire, unaided, where his best men hung back even in harness. There was, in fact, no time now for halting. The rioters, eager on the trail, were calling for torches, and, if discovered before they reached the water, the lives of the two men would be snuffed out by dropping rocks on their heads.

Flattening himself as he had been bidden to do and with his cheek laid to the face of the 278 sheer rock, clasping from time to time with his outstretched left hand such slight uneven surfaces as he could feel, Bucks moved to the right after Dancing, who gripped his extended right hand and led him foot by foot down the perilous way. Not a word was spoken, hardly a breath drawn, as the lineman felt for his slippery foothold with the deftness of a gorilla, and, pressing Bucks’s hand as the signal to take a follow step, he made a slow but steady descent.

The roar of the river already sounded in Bucks’s ears like a cataract, but the shock of extreme danger had numbed his apprehension. Chips of the sharp granite cut his feet like knives, and he knew that the sticky feeling upon his bare soles was blood oozing through the broken skin. He had already given up expectation of ever leaving the gorge alive and merely responded to his companion’s will. The one thought that came to his mind was curiosity as to what Dancing ever expected to do if they reached the bottom without accident.

Suddenly above the roar of the river he heard the muffled crack of fire-arms coming as if out of 279 another world. He wondered whether they themselves were already being fired at, but experienced nothing more than curiosity in the thought. Only the pressure of the big hand that gripped his own impressed itself powerfully upon his consciousness, and at each squeeze he put his foot forward mechanically, intent on a dull resolve to obey orders.

He presently felt a new signal from the long fingers that wound around his own. He tried to answer by stepping, but Dancing whose face was turned away, restrained him. Then it flashed on Bucks that the lineman was signalling Morse to him, and that the dot-and-dash squeezes meant: “Half-way down. Half-way down.”

Bucks answered with one word: “Hurrah!” But he squeezed it along the nerves and muscles like lightning.

He could hear the labored breathing of his companion as he strained at intervals every particle of his strength to reach a new footing of safety. Every vine and scrubby bush down the cliff wall was tested for its strength and root, and 280 Dancing held Bucks’s hand so that he could instantly release it if he himself should plunge to death.

Bucks had already been told that if this happened he must hang as long as he could without moving and if he could hold on till daylight he would be rescued by railroad men. All this was going through his head when, responding to a signal to step down, and, unable to catch some word that Dancing whispered, he stretched his leg so far that he lost his balance. He struggled to recover. Dancing called again sharply to him, but he was too wrought up to understand. Dizziness seized him, and resigning himself, with an exclamation, to death, he felt himself dropping into space.

In the next instant he was caught in Dancing’s arms:

“Gosh darn it, why didn’t you jump, as I told you?” exclaimed the lineman, setting him up on his feet. “You pretty near clean upset us both.”

“Where are we, Bill?” muttered Bucks, swallowing his shock.

281

“Right here at the water, and them fellows up there beating the bush for us. There’s shooting down town, too. Some new deviltry. How good a swimmer are you, Bucks? By gum, I forgot to ask you before you started.”

“I can swim better than I can climb, Bill.”

“We’ve only a quarter of a mile and downstream at that. And the current here would float a keg of nails.”

“How about rocks, Bill?” asked Bucks, peering dubiously toward the roar of the rushing river.

“All up-stream from here,” returned Dancing, edging down the shelving table toward the water. “Lock arms with me so I don’t lose you, sonny. What in Sam Hill is that?”

Far down the river the two saw a tongue of flame leaping into the sky. They watched it for a moment. Dancing was the first to locate the conflagration, which grew now, even as they looked, by leaps and bounds. The two stood ready to plunge into the river when a fire of musketry echoed up the gorge. The lineman clutched Bucks’s arm.

282

“There’s fighting going on down there now. What’s that smokestack? By Jing, the roundhouse is on fire!”