Page:Vance--The trey o hearts.djvu/297

Rh lip of the edge, he lay face downward, clutching desperately the knob of rock, praying that it might not come away in his grasp, that his grasp might hold, that Barcus might arrive in time to save them both. The rope was cutting into his waist like a dull knife. The drag of Judith's body was frightful. He could feel her swinging like a pendulum at the end of its thirty feet, and could imagine but too vividly what would happen if the rope should prove faulty.

The fall of twenty feet to the shale roof was nothing. What would follow would, however, spell death. The impact of her body would set the shale in motion, like an avalanche—and beyond the eaves was only emptiness and the boulder-strewn bed of the chasm, a hundred feet below!

The sweat poured from his face like rain. His eyes started in their sockets. The blood drummed in his ears. His fingers grew numb, his throat dry. He felt that he could not hold on another instant, when, abruptly, that torture was no more. The rope had been relieved of its burden. He heard a scream from above, then the thump of Judith's body falling on the shale, then the slithering rumble of the landslide gathering momentum …

Barcus at length arrived, and assisted him to a place of security. Spent and faint and sick with horror, he lay prone, shuddering.