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 pa.s.sed that 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 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 arete. 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 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 m.u.f.fled crack of fire-arms coming as if out of 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 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 s.p.a.ce.

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.

"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.

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

CHAPTER XXII

They plunged together into the river. The water, icy cold, was a shock, but Dancing had made no mistake. They were below the rocks and needed only to steady themselves as the resistless current swept them down toward the railroad yards.

Bucks demonstrated that he could swim and the two seemed hardly in the water before they could fully see the burning roundhouse. A moment later, chilled to the bone but with his mind cleared by the sharp plunge, Bucks felt his companion's arm drawing him toward the farther sh.o.r.e where, in the slack water of an elbow of the stream, Dancing led the way across a shoal of gravel and Bucks waded after him up the riverbank.

They hastened together across the dark railroad yard. The sound of firing came again from the square in front of the railroad station and thither they directed their fleeing feet. To the right they heard the shouts of the men who were fighting the fire at the roundhouse and the hot crackling of the flames. They reached the station together and entered the waiting-room by a rear door.

Men were running everywhere in and out of the building and the waiting-room was barricaded for war. Bill Dancing caught a pa.s.sing trainman by the arm.

"What's going on here?"

The man looked at the lineman and his companion in surprise: "The gamblers are driving the vigilantes, Bill. They've got all Front Street. What's the matter with you?"

Dancing caught sight of Bob Scott coming down the rear stairway with an armful of rifles, and, without answering the question, called to him.

"h.e.l.lo!" exclaimed Scott halting. He started as he saw Bucks. "Were _you_ with him? And I've been scouring the town for you! Stanley will have a word to say to you, youngster. They thought the gamblers had you, Bill," he added, turning to the lineman.

Dancing, a sight from the pounding he had taken, his clothing in tatters, and with the blood-stains now streaked by the water dripping from his hair, drew himself up. "I hope you didn't think so, Bob? Did they reckon a handful of blacklegs would get me?"

Scott grinned inscrutably. "They've got the best part of your shirt, Bill. How did you get off?"

"Swam for it," muttered Dancing, shaking himself. "Where's Stanley?"

"Out behind the flat cars. He is arming the vigilantes. We've fenced off the yards with loaded freight-cars. They've fired the roundhouse on us, but the rifles and ammunition that came to-night are upstairs here. Take some of these guns, Bill, and hand them around in front.

Bucks can follow you with a box of ammunition."

Scott spoke hurriedly and ran out of the door facing Front Street Square. A string of flat cars had been run along the house-track in front of the station, and behind these the hard-pressed vigilantes, reinforced now by the railroad men, were taking up a new line of defence. Driven through the town in a running battle, they were in straits when they reached Stanley's barricade.

Following a resolve already well defined, the railroad chief conferred with the vigilante leaders for a brief moment. He called them to his office and denounced the folly of half-way measures.

"You see," said Stanley, pointing to two dead men whom the discomfited business men had brought off with them, "what temporizing has done.

There is only one way to treat with these people." He was interrupted by firing from across the square. "In an hour they will have every store in Front Street looted."

The deliberation for a few moments was a stormy one, but Stanley held his ground. "Desperate diseases, gentlemen," he said, addressing Atkinson and his companions, "require desperate remedies, and you must sometime come to what I propose."

"What you propose," returned Atkinson gloomily, "will ruin us."

Stanley answered with composure: "You are ruined now. What you should consider is whether, if you don't cut this cancer of gambling, outlawry, and murder out while you have a chance, it won't remain to plague you as long as you do business in Medicine Bend, and remain to ruin you periodically. This is always going to be a town and a big one. As long as this railroad is operated, this ground where we stand is and must be the chief operating point for the whole mountain division. You and I may be wiped out of existence and the railroad will go on as before. But it is for you to accept or reject what I propose as the riddance of this curse to your community.

"The railroad has been drawn into this fight by a.s.sault upon its men.

It can meet violence with violence and protect itself, or it can temporarily abandon a town where protection is not afforded its lives and property. In an emergency, trains could be run through Medicine Bend without stopping. The right of way could be manned with soldiers. But the railroad can't supply men enough to preserve in your town the law and order which you yourselves ought to preserve. And if we were compelled to build division facilities, temporarily, elsewhere, while they would ultimately come back here, it might be years before they did so. What else but your ruin would this mean?"

He had hardly ceased speaking when the conference was broken in upon.

Bob Scott ushered in two men sent under a flag of truce from the rioters. The offer they brought was that Rebstock and Seagrue should be surrendered, provided Stanley would give his personal pledge that the two should not be shot but sent out of town until peace was restored, and that they should be accorded a fair trial when brought back.

Stanley listened carefully to all that was said:

"Who sent you?" he demanded.

"The committee up street," returned the envoys evasively.