“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.

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 the thought of the man and woman out there in the midst of the storm, hanging over the abyss, rocking back and forth in the frail car and ignorant of what was taking place on shore.  And he did not like to think of their hanging there while he went round by the Yellow Dragon cable to the other drum.

But he remembered a block and tackle in the tool-house, and ran and brought it.  They were double blocks, and he murmured aloud, “A purchase of four,” as he made the tackle fast to the endless cable.  Then he heaved upon it, heaved until it seemed that his arms were being drawn out from their sockets and that his shoulder muscles would be ripped asunder.  Yet the cable did not budge.  Nothing remained but to cross over to the other side.