But those who looked on with bated breath and trembling pulses saw that the attempt must end in failure. Such as stood on the height in security roared out advice to him. He halted, looked in their direction, endeavoured vainly to catch what was said. Men yelled louder, waved their arms, but as none agreed in the advice tendered, the wretch was confused and not assisted. He continued his run eastward, ran――ran with his full strength, and came abruptly on the edge of a mural precipice, with another world far below his feet covered with brushwood, from which he was cut off by a perpendicular escarpment like one of the walls of a crater in the moon. To that lower world he could not descend. Then again he turned to run in an opposite direction. To such as saw him he was like a fox throwing the hounds off his scent, doubling, retrieving, dodging, but always headed. And now as he ran he was brought down by his foot suddenly sinking into a crack that was in process of formation, and which he had not seen in his precipitate haste. By the time he had extracted his leg, this crack had become a gash that descended into darkness. Clinging to a bush, kneeling, as he withdrew his foot, he saw the crumbling chalk dribble into this depth below, and the thought quivered through him that he was going down alive into the bottomless pit. Rendered crazy with fear he mounted a fragment of rock and saw about him the wreckage as of a world――prostrate trees, leaning pillars of rock, disrupted masses of soil, bushes draggling over to drop into the throats open to swallow them. There was but one possibility of salvation open to him, to leap the chasm that divided him from the mainland at one point where as yet the width was not extreme, and the feat was not impossible. But to do this he must act with promptitude. To fail was to fall down that throat to be mumbled and chumped with the grinding rocks. The leap would be considerable, but feasible by any man of moderate activity. Dench retreated to run. Those who saw his purpose shouted to him. He looked up at them bewildered. They called to him to lay aside the carpet-bag. His hand was passed through the loops, and it hung from his wrist. He did not understand what was shouted. Possibly in his then condition of mind he was unconscious that he was still weighted with the bag. He ran, leaped, was flying in space over the chasm, touched the rock on the farther side, caught at the grass; but was overbalanced, dragged backward from the crest by the weight of the bag, and went down with a tuft of wiry grass and hawkweed in his right hand, and disappeared in the midst of the rock and earth that was in process of being chewed. Now the carpet-bag, then a leg, next a hand appeared, and went under again. Then up came the head, only next moment to be drawn beneath and disappear in the mighty mill. CHAPTER L JOINED TOGETHER