and relaxing their grip on the rope. What if the man should
contrive to escape? There seemed no bounds to his ingenuity.... No, he
must be followed on down into the canyon and destroyed, else he would
escape--he would come up out of this inferno, like the demon he was,
and destroy _her_. He must be followed!... And the water--the cool,
refreshing water!

His thirst now seized upon Ashton with terrible intensity. Rage, no
less than the laborious exertion of the descent, had dried up his body
with its feverish fire. Almost maddened with the torment of his
craving, he looped the rope on the spike-head with reckless haste and
slid down over the edge of the cliff.

As the line tautened with his weight it gave several inches, but he
was too nearly frantic to heed. He slipped down it so swiftly that the
strands burned his hands through the tough palms of his gloves. In a
few moments his feet were on a level with Blake's head. He clutched
the rope tighter to check his fall. An instant later he dropped
heavily on the rock shelf at the cliff foot, and the rope came
swishing down after him.

"God!" shouted Blake. Involuntarily he flung back his head and stared
up the great gorge to the faraway heights where were waiting his wife
and child.

But Ashton neither paused nor looked upward. Rebounding from his fall,
he rushed down the slope to the river, with a gasping cry--"Water!
water!"

For a time the engineer stood as if stunned, his big fists clenched,
his broad chest heaving laboriously. Yet he was far too well seasoned
in desperate adventure to give way to despair. Soon he rallied. He
lowered his gaze from the heights to examine the cliff and the
adjoining walls of the gorge. All were alike sheer and unscalable. The
lines about his big mouth hardened with grim determination. He picked
up the rope and began winding it about his mid-body above the
low-buckled cartridge belt.

He arranged the coils with such care that he did not notice the
condition of the end of the line until he had drawn in over eighty
feet. Then at last he saw. Though he had not forgotten to wrap the
line with canvas where it passed over the cliff edge, he had thought
the strands must have been frayed through on a sharp corner of rock.
Instead, he found himself staring at the clean-cut string-wrapped rope
end that he had knotted to the spike.

For several moments he stood looking at it, his forehead creased in
thought. What had become of the knot?...