Page:Clarence Mulford - Man from Bar-20.djvu/254

 The Man from Bar-20 else. Then another smashing rock revived his hopes and made him strain with renewed strength.

At last his fingers gripped the crumbling sandstone of the trail's edge and by a fine display of strength and agility he swung himself over it and rolled swiftly across the slanting ledge to the base of the wall, where he arose to his feet and leaped up the precarious path. The ascent was twelve hundred feet long and it swept upward at a grade which defied anyone to dash along it for any distance. Walking rapidly would have taxed to the utmost a man in the pink of condition; and his pedal exercise for years had been mostly confined to walking to his horse.

The footing was far from satisfactory and demanded close scrutiny in daylight, while in the dark it was a desperate gamble except when attempted at a snail's pace. Ridges, crevices, stones, pebbles, drifts of shale and rotten stone, treacherous in their obedience to the law of gravity when the pressure of a foot started them sliding toward the edge of the abyss; places where the soft sandstone had split in great masses and dropped into the canyon, taking parts of the trail with them and leaving only broken, narrow ledges of the same rotten stone, all these conspired to make him use up precious minutes.

Below him to his right lay a sheer drop of two hundred feet; above him towered the massive wall; behind 242