I will give you a half-share in the gold. What do you want with
me?"

What did I want? I did not know. It must have been the same instinct
that leads one to stamp upon a noxious insect. I think it was his joy
in the hideous spectacle beneath the cataract that had made me long to
kill him.

But now a dreadful fear was dawning on me.

"Jacqueline!" I screamed.

"I have not seen her," he replied. "Now let me go! Ah, _mon Dieu_,
will you never let me go? It is too late!"

Suddenly he grew calm.

"It is too late," he said in a monotonous voice, "You have killed both
of us!"

And, with the sweat still on his forehead, he stood looking maliciously
at me.

"If you had let me go," he said, "you would have died just as you are
going to die."

I saw the face of the cliff quiver; I saw an immense rock, half-way up,
leap into the air and seem to hang there; then the ground was upheaved
beneath my feet, and with a frightful roar the rocky walls swayed and
fell together.

And the rivulet became a cataract that surged over me and filled my
ears with tumult and sealed my eyes with sleep.

CHAPTER XXIV

FULL CONFESSION

Darkness impenetrable about me, and a thick air that I breathed with
great gasps that hardly brought relief to my choking throat. And a
voice out of the darkness crying ceaselessly in my ears:

"Help me! Help me!"

In that nightmare I saw again those awful scenes as vividly as though
they had been etched in phosphorus before my eyes. I saw the last
struggle of Pierre and Leroux, and I pursued Lacroix along the tunnel.
I saw the cliff toppling forward, and the rock poised in mid-air.

And the voice cried: "Help me! Help me!" and never ceased.

I raised myself and tried to struggle to my feet. I found that I could
move my limbs freely, I tried to rise upon my knees, but the roof
struck my head. I stretched my arms out, and I touched the wall on
either side of me.

I must have been stunned by the concussion of the landslide. By a
miracle I had not been struck.

"Help me! Help me!"

I tried to find the voice. I crawled three feet toward it, and the
wall stopped me. But the voice was there. It came from under the
wall. I felt about me in the darkness, and my hand touched something
damp. I whipped it back in horror. It was the face of a man.

There was only the face. Where the body and limbs ought to have been
was only rock. The face was on my side of a wall of rock,