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 comin' 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."