sheave-hook and slashed at the yarn seizings with his pocket-knife; was
still oblivious to it when the released pendulum surged free and swept
him out over the chasm.

XXIII

DEEP UNTO DEEP

Mechanically as such things are done, Ballard remembered afterward that
he was keenly alive to all that was passing. He heard Elsa's
half-stifled cry of horror, Blacklock's shout of encouragement from some
point higher up on the mesa, and mingled with these the quick _pad-pad_
of footfalls as of men running. In mid-air he had a glimpse of the
running men; two of them racing down the canyon on the side toward which
his swinging bridge was projecting him. Then the derrick-fall swept him
on, reached the extreme of its arc, and at the reversing pause he
dropped, all fingers to clutch and tensely strung muscles to hold,
fairly upon the crouching man in the muffling rain-coat.

For Blacklock, charging in upon the battle-field by way of the dam, the
happenings of the next half-minute resolved themselves into a fierce
hand-to-hand struggle between the two men for the possession of the
piece of iron pipe. At the pendulum-swinging instant, the collegian had
seen the sputtering flare of a match in the dynamiter's hands; and in
the dash across the dam he had a whiff of burning gunpowder.

When the two rose up out of the dust of the grapple, Ballard was the
victor. He had wrested the ignited pipe-bomb from his antagonist, and
turning quickly he hurled it in a mighty javelin-cast far up the Elbow.
There was a splash, a smothered explosion, and a geyser-like column of
water shot up from the plunging-point, spouting high to fall in sheets
of silver spray upon the two upcoming runners who were alertly springing
from foothold to foothold across the dissolving mine dump.

So much young Blacklock noted at the moment of uprushing. In the next
breath he had wrapped the mackintoshed bomb-firer in a wrestler's hug
from behind, and the knife raised to be driven into Ballard's back
clattered upon the stones of the path. There was a gasping oath in a
strange tongue, a fierce struggle on the part of the garroted one to
turn and face his new assailant, and then the collegian, with his chin
burrowing between the shoulder-blades of his man, heard swift footsteps
approaching and a deep-toned, musical voice booming out a sharp command:
"Manuel! you grand scoundrel!--drop that thah gun, suh!"

Something else, also metallic, and weightier than the kni