Chapter 2: The Key to the Door

“The road you called, and I believed to be, an unblazed trail through a grave forest, I am beginning to see is just the old sordid, musty Bridge of Sighs across which common malefactors are led,” wrote John Allard to Robert three months after his departure from Sun-Kist. “But if we can agree with Browning’s dictum, there is a certain virtue simply in keeping on at a task assumed, even if the end be questionable. And I am keeping on. Do not fancy I am saying this to trouble you, or in weak regret. All is going better than we dared hope, as you know; and I see no danger near, at present. No; it is only that I have been fearing I gave you some edged doctrines; do not close your hand upon them, for they cut. You can not write to me, of course, since you do not know where I am. Nor shall I myself write again, even with this guarded and unsigned precaution. When this venture ends, I am going away from America; I think I shall enlist in France’s Foreign Legion. Not because I am afraid, but because I want to work. Yet, in spite of success, it seems to me that, like Saxon Harold, I hear a cry in the night: ‘Sanguelac, the arrow, the arrow!’”

There was nothing in the quiet, sun-filled, little hut nestled on the mountain-side, to indicate that here rested one end of the Ponte degli Sospiri. Yet to one of the two men here at bay, the dark bridge arched away as a thing visible.

A siege had been held there all the June afternoon, until now this grateful lull had fallen, —a siege whose tale was punctuated with the snap of bullets, the crash of loosened stones down the cliff, and the shouts of men below. No one yet had ventured on the steep, narrow path winding up to the hut, although there was but one defender, and so far the battle had been bloodless. But neither the big Irishman leaning by the door, nor John Allard, lying helpless on a rough cot, had any doubt of the final result. They were simply waiting for the end to come.

“Desmond, have you hurt any of them?” Allard asked suddenly, rousing himself from a reverie bordering on stupor.

“I have not,” answered the other in accents just touched with Hibernian softness. “But I am thinking they will not come up until dusk. Bird shot scatters.”

“Our own men have gone safely?”

“They have. And if you had not slipped through that hole in the old floor and broken your ankle—”

Allard raised himself on his elbow. Fever lent an artificial brightness to his firm young face and shadowed gray eyes, the waving chestnut hair clung boyishly around a forehead which had acquired one straight line between the brows during the five months since he had left Sun-Kist.

“You should not have stayed, Desmond,” he said earnestly. “You can not help me; I have my own way out of this. You must go now, at least, and try the mountain. I ask you to go.”

“And if I do, it must be at dusk. Look out that door; not a cloud or a shade—and me with a hundred yards of bare mountain-side to cross. Lie easy, sir.”

“Desmond!”

“Oh, it’s a word slipped! Old times are close enough for their ways to come to my tongue in the rush.”

Allard shook his head, but sank back upon the pillow and let his gaze go out the open door opposite. Far below, the silver and azure Hudson widened into the Tappan Zee, set in purple and emerald hills which curved softly away to the distant outposts of the Palisades. Fair and tranquil, warmly palpitating under the summer sunshine, the scene was cruel in its placid indifference to the struggle here upon the cliff-like mountain. The very breeze that fluttered in brought taunting perfumes of cedar and blossom from a country-side out of reach; poised airily between earth and sky, a snowy sea-gull flaunted its unvalued liberty. Sighing, the Californian dropped the curtain of his lashes before a world no longer his. He had been so near safety, the arrow had been held so long upon the cord, that disaster came now with a double keenness of stroke.