Thunder On The Right (27 page)

it was this side of the avalanche, I'm certain of it ... a cry and a clatter of hoofs, both at once."

He said thickly, "Doña Francisca. Landslide may have got her. Or else the mule . . .

starting to bolt when the fall came . . . met her. Frightened her. ..."

Jenny said, on a long breath:
"This side of the avalanche."

He moved a little, so that his shoulders were against the rock. "Listen." His hand came out, and gripped her arm with surprising strength. "It's a chance. You'll have to go on. I can't." His grip tightened convulsively, as if pain had wrenched at him, and his voice came jerkily, but hard and clear: "I think I know where the landslide'!! be.

There was a place—never mind. It's between here and the cascade, and it'll have blocked the way. Marie's already through. She was to wait by the cascade, and turn the mule back."

He paused. The grip on her arm was slackening, but the man's eyes held hers, hard and compelling. "The señora'll have to scramble over it—or come back. Either will take time. You'll have to get there . . . first. You can, I think. There's another way."

"Tell me."

He gave a little sideways jerk of the head. His fingers dug at her arm. "At the next corner ... on the left. A path down between two pointed rocks. It runs . . . below this, almost down to the water. Harder going, but shorter, and all right, if you can see."

"It's light enough. It goes to the cascade?"

"Yes. Listen now." He dragged himself up a little, his face thrust out of shadow into the starlight like a mask of pain and effort. "The way into Spain ... a rock bridge across the face of the cascade. Safe enough if you take it . . . slowly. But you must .

. . hurry. This storm . . . the river'll be filling up fast, and at high water the cascade ...

drowns . . . the bridge."

He drew her closer. His voice was weaker now.

"Get across with her. You'll be in time. If the water's rising, the señora may be too late. If not, and if you can't hide in time . . „ well, it's a narrow bridge, and it's easy to ... hold."

"Yes," said Jenny, hoarsely.

"If that murdering bitch does catch you------"

"Yes?" Her voice was a croak.

"Why, you'll have to ... kill her . . . Snow Queen," said Bussac, and his grip went slack and fell from her sleeve.

He was still breathing, but there was nothing she could do. She let go the mule's bridle, then she searched Bus-sac's pocket for his knife. It was in his left-hand pocket, and her hand came out warm and sticky. But she hardly noticed: she had the knife.

She straightened up, gripping it, pushed past the quiescent mule, and almost ran on, up the narrow track, alone in the now strong starlight.

The way off the track was easy enough to find. It plunged off to the left, winding down among the fallen scree like a dizzy natural staircase. She went down it at a breakneck speed, with a sure-footedness born of a desperation that had forgotten fear.

Here and there a sturdy sapling helped her; she would slither boldly down in a miniature avalanche of shale until she fetched up against its solid shaft, then, swinging around as by a newel post, would plunge unhesitatingly down for the next foothold. Bruises she must have collected by the score, but she never felt them; mercifully she did not fall. She hurtled down the scarp in a series of short, zigzag rushes, ricocheting as it were from rock and tree and back to rock again, until at length she landed with a scrambling thump on what was discernibly a track.

If anything larger and less agile than the chamois ever used the track, there was no evidence of the fact. But a way could be picked through the tumble of rocks, and Jennifer, able now to see pretty clearly, managed to propel herself along it at a very fair speed. Propel—because only rarely did she dare make any move without the aid of her hands; the path was shaken, almost, by the roar of the torrent close beside it, and the air was chill and luminous with flung spray. Beyond the raging water rose the gully's further wall, black and sheer, a giant precipice. She clung closely to the rough overgrown rock on her right as she pulled herself along the almost nonexistent path.

This did, indeed, vanish completely before very long. Jennifer stopped, sobbing for breath, and looked around her in an access of panic.

Then she realized that the ground she was on was soft and friable, loose stuff in which her shoes sank ankle-deep, and where raw-looking jags of rock stuck up like fangs. She glanced around her Above and below, the same tumble of earth and rock bore witness. She was crossing the track of the landslide. She made her way cautiously across the shifting, sliding stuff, and presently regained the path.

This now began to climb, mounting the hillside rapidly, in dizzy deer-steps that pushed steeply up toward the ever loudening thunder of the invisible cascade. She heaved herself, somehow, up the breakneck staircase, once more blind and deaf to everything but the need for haste. It seemed that she had been stumbling forever, bruised and breathless, in this nightmare of wind and darkness, through the water-haunted depths of the bare mountain.

Then suddenly, around a jut of steep rock at a bend in the staircase, she came upon the cascade.

Here the gully took a sharp turn to the west, and, down in its sheer depths, the stormwind had no way. Nor had it a voice. The only voice was the enormous thunder of water, the only wind the wind of the torrent which, a short way ahead, poured glimmering down from some remote and undiscovered watershed hundreds of feet above.

To Jennifer, pausing and blinking against the rock face at the bend of the gully, it seemed as if the great force were pouring out of the high night sky. Then, with one of those sudden changes of mountain storms, a rack of cloud, lifted over the wind, laid bare a swimming and luminous moon, so that to her bemused eyes it was now as if the waterfall fell in a long white thunder, straight from the pool of the moon itself.

The gully now etched itself sharply, black and white in the moonlight. On either side towered the cliffs, stark and bare; ahead, and as stark, loomed the great barrier of rock over which the torrent poured like an arras. To right, to left, ahead, the place seemed impassable.

But above, like an arc of shadow across the torrent's face, she saw the road to Spain. A dreadful natural bridge of rock, fallen from the sides of the gully, and wedged into a nightmare arch that wavered insubstantial in the starlit spray. Behind it fell the cascade in a steady thunderous sheet of white, to smash itself in a fury below on jutting ledge and fallen rock, then to leap, in a hundred spouts of roping and whirling water, into the bellowing black pool at the bottom of the gully.

She blinked again. Yes, there it was. Beside the cascade, at the end of that unbelievable bridge, wavered through the edge of the spray a tiny light. A lantern. It moved, swaying a little, its uncertain nimbus of yellow light dimming and shifting as spray burst and smoked in front of it.

She was there. Gillian was there. Waiting.

Jennifer ran on, with a prayer tasting bitter as the sweat upon her lips.

She had actually begun the steep final scramble that led up to the level of the

"bridge" before it occurred to her to wonder what on earth she was going to say to Gillian.

Gillian had, after all, last seen her as the victim of Bus-sac's anger in the cottage kitchen—an accomplice of the police, and an obstacle to their safe flight from France. How would she receive Jenny's apparent inclusion in Bussac's plans for that flight?

She paused, fighting for breath, leaning against a high step of rock which barred her way, and looked upward. The path seemed to smooth itself out in the moonlight, a deceptively easy ladder of rock rising straight up to the cascade; Jacob's ladder, propped against the moon. . . .

She rubbed her burning face with her coat sleeve, as if to wipe away the crowding fancies of exhaustion, and, fixing her eyes on the lantern's point of light, began the last stage of her climb.

The lantern stayed where it was, swaying a little as its bearer moved. But steady enough. Gillian was still there, safe. The Spanish woman could not have reached her yet. So far, so good. . . . But how in the wide world was Jennifer going to persuade an excusably distrustful Gillian to cross the cascade with her instead of waiting for Bussac? How get her away from a danger which she obviously could not suspect?

The strain and terror through which she had passed, the actual physical exhaustion she was now fighting, had left no room or capacity for reasoned thought. It was only as she hauled herself, sobbing and almost done, up the final few feet of the climb, that the simple truth came to her, with all its implications.

Bussac would never take Gillian into Spain.
The man was either dead or dying.

What was certain was that, as far as Gillian was concerned, Bussac was out of the game. The issue 'ay. quite simply,, between Jennifer and the Spaniard. All she had to do was to hide herself and Gillian from Dofia Francisea until she couid get her safely down to help and civilization—and England. There was no question of crossing that dreadful bridge. In the darkness, in the black gullies and crevices of the bare mountain, a troop of men could hide with perfect ease. She could spin some tale to Gillian. . . .

She dragged herself up the last steep little pitch of rock, and went forward at a stumbling run toward the lantern's light.

Gillian had put the lantern down near the edge of the water; its yellow gleam shimmered steadily, glassed in the wet slab on which it stood. Now and again spray spurted from the torrent's edge and burst across the light in a comet's-tail of sparks.

She herself was nowhere to be seen.

Jennifer ran forward, to drop on her knees by the lantern, shielding its light with her body from the way pursuit would come. Then a dark figure detached itself from the blackness of an overhang near by, and Gillian's voice, clear above the thunder of the cascade, cried,
"Quoi done, mamselle?"

Jennifer was fumbling with the lantern, gasping, "Quickly, Madame Bussac! Put this out. We've got to hide!"

"But why are you here? Pierre said------"

"Pierre's coming later. He was stopped. He sent me to warn you. I'm no enemy of yours, you know. I explained things to him after you'd gone. I want to help. Now,
put this out!
"

There was something in tone, in face, in shaking desperate hands, that gave their own command. Gillian stooped, found the screw and turned it. The warm little light ebbed and died away into the chilly
clair-obscur
of white moon and black mountain.

"Where's Pierre?" demanded Gillian.

"He can't come yet. We are to hide now, and make our way down to him later.

We------"

"Is he in danger?"

"Yes," said Jennifer truthfully. "We must go back." She stood up and caught her cousin's arm in an urgent grip. "Come now—straight away. We must find cover."

Gillian turned immediately toward the cleft of shadow where she had hidden before.

Jennifer, snatching up the dead lantern, followed, with a little sob of thankfulness at the ease with which her thin story—no story at all—had been accepted. Gillian turned again and reached out a hand.

"
Venez done
," she said. "We can get up here------"

She stopped and stiffened, staring beyond Jennifer's shoulder. Jennifer whirled.

From somewhere above them, from the tumble of new rock where the landslide had been, came a rattle of dislodged stones. Then across a patch of moonlight came a shadow, black, swift, shapeless, with a dark cloak blown around it.

"Here's Pierre!" cried Gillian, and ran out again into the clear moonlight.

Afterwards, Jennifer could never quite say what happened next.

She herself dropped the lantern with a crash, and jumped forward. She saw Gillian's face, lifted in the moonlight, change from expectancy to bewilderment, from bewilderment to apprehension, to fear, to terror. She saw Doña Francisca coming down the scree toward them, her black robes flapping around her. Then at sight of Jennifer, she screamed, "You! I knew it! You!"

And Gillian turned, with a little sob of fear, and ran straight out across the face of the cascade, as if the slender arch of fallen rock were a highway bridge, and the uncertain moonlight the glare of noon. Without knowing what she did, Jennifer turned and followed her.

To the right, the great thundering wall of water, shutting off the light; to the left, the roaring drop to the black pool . . . the bridge itself was only a scramble of rocks fallen and flung by some convulsion of the mountain across the dreadful gap of waters. It seemed to shake with the roar of the fall; the tilted rocks streaming black and treacherous under the fans of intermittently flung spray.

And across this terrible bridge Gillian fled, with Jennifer at her heels. They were out in the center now; poised, it seemed, precariously in space above a great hanging cloud of moon-tinted spray, on which the shadow of the bridge trembled like a darker rainbow. The noise was terrific. Was it only fancy, or was the torrent pressing closer and ever closer to the bridge? Every few seconds some great shining fan of water leaped out, slapping down on the slabs. Jets of foam shot down like twisting white ropes, to smash at their feet and fray off into glittering fringes that fumed down to thicken the rainbow haze. The torrent crowded closer. The rocks streamed, Gillian was two-thirds of the way overs scrambling up a tilted boulder sleek with sliding water. Jennifer, clinging below her, glanced back.

Doña Francisca had reached the bridge. Had paused there,, daunted, possibly, by the sight of that fearful crossing. She was shouting something inaudible, but she made no move.

Beside Jennifer came, faintly, through the bellow of the water, an echo of the cry.

She whipped around, just in time to see Gillian gain the top of the boulder, then slip, slither for a moment with frantically clutching arms flung over the streaming rock, and fall back onto the slab where Jennifer stood, to lie inert and limp, her body wedged precariously between the rocks, and her head hanging helplessly over the outward drop.