Verney, Otto and Barney alone among them fully understood what was taking place. But the others realized instinctively that the tall, dark man on the upper ledge was ordering the woman on the lower to throw herself over the precipice.
Barney drew the pistol he had been lent and aimed it at Lothar, then lowered his arm. At that range even rifles were proving ineffective, and a pistol bullet might as easily have hit Mary as the man who was driving her to her death. He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again Mary had thrown herself sideways and was hurtling into the abyss.
***
The parties had started upward again. The rifles had ceased to crack. Lothar had disappeared unharmed into the cave. Barney was climbing now as an automaton. Grief and pain filled his mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Instinctively he continued to place his feet in the footsteps of the man ahead and to advance or halt as he was told.
That he should have been robbed of Mary at the eleventh hour caused him a sick misery the like of which he had never before known in all his life. During the past unbearably anxious days he had come to realize that she meant everything to him; that no other woman could ever compensate him for her loss. Almost he had resigned himself to it, believing it next to impossible that the Great Ram would allow her to live after she had thrown the crucifix in his face. Yet he had. Only a few minutes ago she had still been alive, and unharmed. Now she was dead, a broken twisted body grotesquely doubled across some spur of rock, or buried deep in snow, far down below.
The Sergeant rounded a shoulder of the mountain that brought the cable railway again into full view. Suddenly he gave a shout:
There she is! Blessed God, a miracle!'
The others clambered round the corner after him. He had come out on a humpy ledge of rock broad enough for all his team to stand on. Opposite to them and about ten feet away sagged one of the long swags of triple cable along which the cage of the railway ran. Twenty feet lower down there stood one of the tall T-shaped steel pylons that supported the cables. At the base of the pylon, where snow had piled up, Mary was lying on her stomach, clinging with one arm to the nearest steel strut.
Her sideways lurch as she fell had temporarily saved her. Instead of plunging to the depths she had shot forward beneath the railway terminus platform, hit one of its outer stanchions, checked, slid, bounced, rolled and finally brought up on the drift of snow that had accumulated against the first great pylon some eighty feet below the level of the cave.
'Mary! Mary!' Barney's voice cracked as he shouted down to her. 'Hang on! Can you hang on? Are you all right?'
She squirmed round and her feeble cry came back, 'I've a broken arm. Ribs too I think. But go on up. Twelve o'clock! Twelve o'clock!'
Barney did not need to look at his watch. From the time that had elapsed since he had seen her fall he knew that it could now be only a few minutes to noon. To complete their climb in the tiny fraction of an hour that was left was beyond the bounds of possibility. And the other teams were no nearer to the cave than his.
The Great Ram had won. He would launch his accursed rocket and bring incalculable death and suffering on the world. But for some time at least the mountain areas of Switzerland would remain unaffected. And Mary was lying there still within a hair's breadth of death. To save her was now the highest priority.
Turning to the Sergeant, Barney cried, 'How can we get her up? What's the drill?'
The Sergeant shook his head. 'We can do nothing from here. We must first complete our climb to the cave. From there one of us can be lowered to get a rope round her.'
'But that will take half an hour, longer perhaps,' Barney burst out. 'At any moment the slope of snow on which she's lying may collapse. Anyhow, it's freezing and one of her arms is broken. She'll never be able to hang on that long.'
'There is no other way.' The Sergeant pointed. 'Look for yourself, Sir. We can get down to her only from above. Even if we threw her a rope and she could catch and make herself fast to it, that would not help. If the snow gives or she lets go her hold on the pylon, she would swing out and be dashed to death against the cliff face below us.'
'There is a way,' Barney retorted. 'Quick, give me an extra rope, and lengthen the one attached to me. I'm going to jump to the cable, shin along it to the pylon, and go down to her.'
A chorus of protest arose from the five soldiers. They declared that he was mad - that it would be suicide - that the jump was too far for him to catch the cable - that if he missed it the rope could not save him as he, in that case, would be dashed to death as he swung violently against the rock face.
His Irish temper flaming at their opposition, he shouted them down, then bullied them into reluctantly equipping him with ropes in the way he had demanded. Eyeing him with mixed amazement, admiration and distress, they stood back to give him the best run that the ledge afforded. At that moment a single shot rang out, but none of them heeded it. Drawing a deep breath, he took his run and launched himself across the gaping chasm.
He hit the nearest cable with his body. His hands were held open and stretched high above his head. The cable gave under the impact. As it snapped back like a twanged bowstring his body doubled across it, his head went down and he was within an ace of somersaulting over it to his death. But he managed to grab it with his gloved hands and, next moment, was hanging by them from it.
The Sergeant and his men let out a spontaneous cheer, then watched spellbound as he made his way foot by foot along the now sagging cable, expecting every moment that the weight of his body would prove too much for his arms, and that he would drop like a stone into the depths above which he was swinging.
The strain on his arms was terrible. He felt as though they were being dragged from their sockets. But he reached the T-shaped head of the pylon. As he grasped it and clung there panting another cheer went up. For a moment he remained there to recover his breath. Then he scrambled down the steel latticework of which the pylon was constructed.
Mary, half lying on her side, had been holding her breath as she watched him. When he got down to within a few feet of her she breathed again, and murmured,
'Oh Barney, Barney! Just to think you've risked your life for me - even though you despise me.'
'Despise you!' he echoed. 'Oh Mary, Mary, how can you say that? I love you. I love you. And you risked a worse death than a broken neck when you saved me from the Great Ram in the chapel.'
As he was speaking he passed the loop of the spare rope over her head. With a moan of pain she raised her broken arm and got it through the loop. He drew it tight and made it fast to a strut of the pylon. Then he made his own rope fast to another strut and lowered himself on to the snow beside her.
A shiver shook her and she moaned, 'I'm so cold, darling; so cold. I couldn't have hung on for another five minutes.' Yet despite her pain she was smiling.
Even if the snow gave the ropes would hold them now. Taking her in his arms, he said, 'They'll get us up soon, my sweet, and I'll never let you be cold or lonely again.' Then their icy breath mingled as their lips met in a long kiss.
***
It was nearly half past twelve before Mary was hauled up to the platform outside the cave, now crowded with the Alpine troops. Yet the rocket had not been fired. As they wrapped her in blankets and laid her gently on a ready-made stretcher, C.B. knelt down beside her, took her hands and chafed them. In a husky voice he said,
'Mary, my dear; I've known a lot of brave women but you are the bravest of them all. Thank God we arrived in time to save you; and may He bless you all your days.'
Her eyes were shining. 'Thank you,' she murmured. 'Thank you. But He's blessed me already. Barney has asked me to marry him.'
'I'd have bet any money that he would,' C.B. smiled. 'It remains only for me to ask His Lordship if he'll have me for best man at the wedding.'
She frowned. 'Please don't joke about it. His calling himself Lord Larne was just a part of his phoney character for the job.'
Verney shoo
k his head. 'You're off the mark there, my dear. He became the Earl of Larne five years ago; but when he came into the title he made a complete break with his old life and decided not to use it in the new one until he had lived down his raffish past. You'll make the loveliest Countess of Larne they've ever had in the family.'
At that moment Barney was hauled up over the edge. After smiling at Mary he turned quickly to C.B. and asked, 'What happened? Did something go wrong with the rocket when Lothar tried to launch it, or was he hit by that single shot I heard just before midday?'
Verney came to his feet. 'Neither, partner. That shot was fired by Otto from a pistol lent him by the Swiss. He realized that we couldn't get up here in time and shot himself through the heart.'
'D'you mean he committed suicide in despair?'
'Not in despair. He died a hero's death. I'm sure of it. When the first troops got here they found Lothar lying flat on his face. As he wasn't bleeding they thought he'd had a stroke and undid his tunic. Over his heart there was a great black bruise, as though he'd been kicked there by a mule. Otto knew better than any of us the way in which what happened to one twin could affect the other. By shooting himself he killed his brother with a heart attack.'
After a moment, C.B. added, 'Although there was no thunderbolt or stroke of lightning, I shall always believe that at the eleventh hour, through Otto Khune, God intervened to defeat the powers of Evil.'
THE END
FB2 document info
Document ID: 27c438cc-db72-45e8-af23-97d2025b87d9
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 26.12.2012
Created using: calibre 0.9.11 software
Document authors :
Dennis Wheatley
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