feet before him stood the steel drum round which the endless cable worked. By
the drum, snug and fast, was the ore-car. Following with his eyes the dizzy flight
of the cables to the farther bank, he could see the other drum and the other car.
The contrivance was worked by gravity, the loaded car crossing the river by virtue
of its own weight, and at the same time dragging the empty car back. The loaded
car being emptied, and the empty car being loaded with more ore, the
performance could be repeated-a performance which had been repeated tens of
thousands of times since the day Old Jerry became the keeper of the cables.
Young Jerry broke off his song at the sound of approaching footsteps. A tall, blueskirted
man, a rifle across the hollow of his arm, came out from the gloom of the
pine-trees. It was Hall, watchman of the Yellow Dragon mine, the cables of which
spanned the Sacramento a mile farther up.
“Hello, younker!” was his greeting. “What you doin’ here by your lonesome?”
“Oh, bachin ;” Jerry tried to answer unconcernedly, as if it were a very ordinary
sort of thing. “Dad’s away, you see.”
“Where’s he gone?” the man asked.
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27
“San Francisco. Went last night. His brother’s dead in the old country, and he’s
gone down to see the lawyers. Won’t be back till tomorrow night.”
So spoke Jerry, and with pride, because of the responsibility which had fallen to
him of keeping an eye on the property of the Yellow Dream, and the glorious
adventure of living alone on the cliff above the river and of cooking his own
meals.
Well, take care of yourself,” Hall said, “and don’t monkey with the cables. I’m
goin’ to see if I can’t pick up a deer in the Cripple Cow Canon.”
“It’s goin’ to rain, I think,” Jerry said, with mature deliberation.
“And it’s little I mind a wettin’,” Hall laughed, as he strode away among the trees.
Jerry’s prediction concerning rain was more than fulfilled. By ten o’clock the pines
were swaying and moaning, the cabin windows rattling, and the rain driving by in
fierce squalls. At half past eleven he kindled a fire, and promptly at the stroke of
twelve sat down to his dinner.
No out-of-doors for him that day, he decided, when he had washed the few dishes
and put them neatly away; and he wondered how wet Hall was and whether he
had succeeded in picking up a deer.
At one o’clock there came a knock at the door, and when he opened it a man and a
woman staggered in on the breast of a great gust of wind. They were Mr. and Mrs.
Spillane, ranchers, who lived in a lonely valley a dozen miles back from the river.
“Where’s Hall?” was Spillane’s opening speech, and he spoke sharply and quickly.
Jerry noted that he was nervous and abrupt in his movements, and that Mrs.
Spillane seemed laboring under some strong anxiety. She was a thin, washed-out,
worked-out woman, whose life of dreary and unending toil had stamped itself
harshly upon her face. It was the same life that had bowed her husband’s
shoulders and gnarled his hands and turned his hair to a dry and dusty gray.
“He’s gone hunting up Cripple Cow,” Jerry answered. “Did you want to cross?”
The woman began to weep quietly, while Spillane dropped a troubled exclamation
and strode to the window. Jerry joined him in gazing out to where the cables lost
themselves in the thick downpour.
It was the custom of the backwoods people in that section of country to cross the
Sacramento on the Yellow Dragon cable. For this service a small toll was
charged, which tolls the Yellow Dragon Company applied to the payment of
Hall’s wages.
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28
“We’ve got to get across, Jerry,” Spillane said, at the same time jerking his thumb
over his shoulder in the direction of his wife. “Her father’s hurt at the Clover Leaf.
Powder explosion. Not expected to live. We just got word.”
Jerry felt himself fluttering inwardly. He knew that Spillane wanted to cross on
the Yellow Dream cable, and in the absence of his father he felt that he dared not
assume such a responsibility, for the cable had never been used for passengers; in
fact, had not been used at all for a long time.
“Maybe Hall will be back soon;” he said.
Spillane shook his head, and demanded, “Where’s your father?”
“San Francisco,” Jerry answered, briefly.
Spillane groaned, and fiercely drove his clenched fist into the palm of the other
hand. His wife was crying more audibly, and Jerry could hear her murmuring,
“And daddy’s dyin’, dyin’!”
The tears welled up in his own eyes, and he stood irresolute, not knowing what he
should do. But the man decided for him.
“Look here, kid,” he said, with determination, “the wife and me are goin’ over on
this here cable of yours! Will you run it for us?”
Jerry backed slightly away. He did it unconsciously, as if recoiling instinctively
from something unwelcome.
“Better see if Hall’s back,” he suggested.
“And if he ain’t?”
Again Jerry hesitated.
“I’ll stand for the risk,” Spillane added. “Don’t you see, kid, we’ve simply got to
cross!”
Jerry nodded his head reluctantly.
“And there ain’t no use waitin’ for Hall,” Spillane went on. “You know as well as
me he ain’t back from Cripple Cow this time of day! So come along and let’s get
started.”
No wonder that Mrs. Spillane seemed terrified as they helped her into the ore-car
— so Jerry thought, as he gazed into the apparently fathomless gulf beneath her.
For it was so filled with rain and cloud, hurtling and curling in the fierce blast,
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29
that the other shore, seven hundred feet away, was invisible, while the cliff at
their feet dropped sheer down and lost itself in the swirling vapor. By all
appearances it might be a mile to bottom instead of two hundred feet.
“All ready?” he asked.
“Let her go!” Spillane shouted, to make himself heard above the roar of the wind.
He had clambered in beside his wife, and was holding one of her hands in his.
Jerry looked upon this with disapproval. “You’ll need all your hands for holdin’
on, the way the wind’s yowlin’.”
The man and the woman shifted their hands accordingly, tightly gripping the sides
of the car, and Jerry slowly and carefully released the brake. The drum began to
revolve as the endless cable passed round it, and the car slid slowly out into the
chasm, its trolley wheels rolling on the stationary cable overhead, to which it was
suspended.
It was not the first time Jerry had worked the cable, but it was the first time he had
done so away from the supervising eye of his father. By means of the brake he
regulated the speed of the car. It needed regulating, for at times, caught by the
stronger gusts of wind, it swayed violently back and forth; and once, just before it
was swallowed up in a rain squall, it seemed about to spill out its human contents.
After that Jerry had no way of knowing where the car was except by means of the
cable. This he watched keenly as it glided around the drum. “Three hundred feet,”
he breathed to himself, as the cable markings went by, “three hundred and fifty,
four hundred; four hundred and—”
The cable had stopped. Jerry threw off the brake, but it did not move. He caught
the cable with his hands and tried to start it by tugging smartly. Something had
gone wrong. What? He could not guess; he could not see. Looking up, he could
vaguely make out the empty car, which had been crossing from the opposite cliff
at a speed equal to that of the loaded car. It was about two hundred and fifty feet
away. That meant, he knew, that somewhere in the gray obscurity, two hundred
feet above the river and two hundred and fifty feet from the other bank, Spillane
and his wife were suspended and stationary.
Three times Jerry shouted with all the shrill force of his lungs, but no answering
cry came out of the storm. It was impossible for him to hear them or to make
himself heard. As he stood for a moment, thinking rapidly, the flying clouds
seemed to thin and lift. He caught a brief glimpse of the swollen Sacramento
beneath, and a briefer glimpse of the car and the man and woman. Then the
clouds descended thicker than ever.
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30
The boy examined the drum closely, and found nothing the matter with it.
Evidently it was the drum on the other side that had gone wrong. He was appalled
at thought of the man and woman out there in the midst of the storm, hanging