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The Christmas Miracle
by
He wondered if the inmates yet lived,–he pitied them still more if they only existed to realize their peril, to await in an anguish of fear their ultimate doom. Perhaps–he felt he was but trifling with despair–some rescue might be devised.
Such a weird cry he set up on the brink of the mountain!–full of horror, grief, and that poignant hope. The echoes of the Gap seemed reluctant to repeat the tones, dull, slow, muffled in snow. But a sturdy halloo responded from the window, uppermost now, for the house lay on its side amongst the boughs. Kennedy thought he saw the pallid simulacrum of a face.
“This be Jube Kennedy,” he cried, reassuringly. “I be goin’ ter fetch help,–men, ropes, and a windlass.”
“Make haste then,–we uns be nigh friz.”
“Ye air in no danger of fire, then?” asked the practical man.
“We hev hed none,–before we war flunged off’n the bluff we hed squinched the fire ter pledjure Bob, ez he war afeard Santy Claus would scorch his feet comm’ down the chimbley,–powerful lucky fur we uns; the fire would hev burnt the house bodaciously.”
Kennedy hardly stayed to hear. He was off in a moment, galloping at frantic speed along the snowy trail scarcely traceable in the sad light of the gray day; taking short cuts through the densities of the laurel; torn by jagged rocks and tangles of thorny growths and broken branches of great trees; plunging now and again into deep drifts above concealed icy chasms, and rescuing with inexpressible difficulty the floundering, struggling horse; reaching again the open sheeted roadway, bruised, bleeding, exhausted, yet furiously plunging forward, rousing the sparsely settled country-side with imperative insistence for help in this matter of life or death!
Death, indeed, only,–for the enterprise was pronounced impossible by those more experienced than Kennedy. Among the men now on the bluff were several who had been employed in the silver mines of this region, and they demonstrated conclusively that a rope could not be worked clear of the obstructions of the face of the rugged and shattered cliffs; that a human being, drawn from the cabin, strapped in a chair, must needs be torn from it and flung into the abyss below, or beaten to a frightful death against the jagged rocks in the transit.
“But not ef the chair war ter be steadied by a guy-rope from–say–from that thar old pine tree over thar,” Kennedy insisted, indicating the long bole of a partially uprooted and inverted tree on the steeps. “The chair would swing cl’ar of the bluff then.”
“But, Jube, it is onpossible ter git a guy-rope over ter that tree,–more than a man’s life is wuth ter try it.”
A moment ensued of absolute silence,–space, however, for a hard-fought battle.
The aspect of that mad world below, with every condition of creation reversed; a mistake in the adjustment of the winch and gear by the excited, reluctant, disapproving men; an overstrain on the fibres of the long-used rope; a slip on the treacherous ice; the dizzy whirl of the senses that even a glance downward at those drear depths set astir in the brain,–all were canvassed within his mental processes, all were duly realized in their entirety ere he said with a spare dull voice and dry lips,–
“Fix ter let me down ter that thar leanin’ pine, boys,–I’ll kerry a guy-rope over thar.”
At one side the crag beetled, and although it was impossible thence to reach the cabin with a rope it would swing clear of obstructions here, and might bring the rescuer within touch of the pine, where could be fastened the guy-rope; the other end would be affixed to the chair which could be lowered to the cabin only from the rugged face of the cliff. Kennedy harbored no self-deception; he more than doubted the outcome of the enterprise. He quaked and turned pale with dread as with the great rope knotted about his arm-pits and around his waist he was swung over the brink at the point where the crag jutted forth,–lower and lower still; now nearing the slanting inverted pine, caught amidst the debris of earth and rock; now failing to reach its boughs; once more swinging back to a great distance, so did the length of the rope increase the scope of the pendulum; now nearing the pine again, and at last fairly lodged on the icy bole, knotting and coiling about it the end of the guy-rope, on which he had come and on which he must needs return.