Two men had dropped upon their knees and were aiming more carefully.  He swung his sight to the foremost, and drove a bullet straight through his chest.  The next moment something seemed to have fallen upon him with crushing weight.  A red sea rose before his eyes.  In it he was submerged; the roar of it filled his ears; it blinded him; and in the suffocating embrace of it he tried to cry out.  He fought himself out of it, his eyes cleared, and he could see again.  His rifle was no longer in his hands, and he was standing.  Twenty feet away men were rushing upon him.  His brain recovered itself with the swiftness of lightning.  A bullet had stunned him, but he was not badly hurt.  He jerked out his automatic, but before he could raise it, or even fire from his hip, the first of his assailants was upon him with a force that drove it from his hand.  They went down together, and as they struggled on the bare rock Aldous caught for a fraction of a second a scene that burned itself like fire in his brain.  He saw Mortimer FitzHugh with a revolver in his hand.  He had stopped; he was staring like one looking upon the ghost of the dead, and as he stared there rose above the rumbling roar of the chasm a wild and terrible shriek from Joanne.

Aldous saw no more then.  He was not fighting for his life, but for her, and he fought with the mad ferocity of a tiger.  As he struck, and choked, and beat the head of his assailant on the rock, he heard shriek after shriek come from Joanne’s lips; and then for a flash he saw them again, and Joanne was struggling in the arms of Quade!

He struggled to his knees, and the man he was fighting struggled to his knees; and then they came to their feet, locked in a death-grip on the edge of the chasm.  From Quade’s clutch he saw Joanne staring at Mortimer FitzHugh; then her eyes shot to him, and with another shriek she fought to free herself.

For thirty seconds of that terrible drama Mortimer FitzHugh stood as if hewn out of rock.  Then he sprang toward the fighters.

In the arms of John Aldous was the strength of ten men.  He twisted the head of his antagonist under his arm; he braced his feet—­in another moment he would have flung him bodily into the roaring maelstrom below.  Even as his muscles gathered themselves for the final effort he knew that all was lost.  Mortimer FitzHugh’s face leered over his shoulder, his demoniac intention was in his eyes before he acted.  With a cry of hatred and of triumph he shoved them both over the edge, and as Aldous plunged to the depths below, still holding to his enemy, he heard a last piercing scream from Joanne.