"I can stand here till I get tired," retorted Lynch. "After that-- Well, I'd as soon end up down there as get a bullet through my ribs. One thing, I wouldn't go alone."
"Suppose I offered to let you go free if you give up Miss Thorne?" Stratton asked with sudden earnestness.
"Offer? Hell! Yuh can't fool me with that kind of talk. Not unless yuh hand over yore gun, that is. Do that, an' I might consider the proposition--not otherwise."
Buck hesitated, his eyes flashing from the weapon he whirled so carelessly between his fingers to Lynch, whose eyes regarded him intently over the girl's shoulder.
"That would be putting an awful lot of trust in you," he commented. "Once you had the gun, what's to prevent you from drilling me--Oh, damn!"
He made a sudden, ineffectual grab at the gun, which had slipped from his fingers, and missed. As the weapon clattered against the rocks, Lynch's covetous glance followed it involuntarily. What happened next was a bewildering whirl of violent, unexpected action.
To Mary it seemed as if Buck cleared the space between them in a single amazing leap. He landed with one foot slipping on the ragged edge of the precipice, and apparently threw his whole weight sidewise against Lynch and the girl he held. Just how it happened she did not know, but in another moment Mary found herself freed from those hateful, gripping hands and flung back against her horse, while at her feet the two men grappled savagely.
Over and over on the narrow confines of the sloping ledge they struggled fiercely, heaving, panting, with muscles cracking, each seemingly possessed with a grim determination to thrust the other into the abyss. Now Buck was uppermost; again Lynch, by some clever trick, tore himself from Stratton's hold to gain a momentary advantage.
Like one meshed in the thralls of some hateful nightmare, the girl crouched against her horse, her face so still and white and ghastly that it might well have been some clever sculptor's bizarre conception of "Horror" done in marble. Only her eyes seemed to live. Wide, dilated, glittering with an unnatural light, they shifted constantly, following the progress of those two writhing bodies.
Once, when Lynch's horse snorted and moved uneasily, she caught his bridle and quieted him with a soothing word, her voice so choked and hoarse that she scarcely knew it. Again, as the men rolled toward the outer side of the ledge and seemed for a moment almost to overhang the precipice, she gave a smothered cry and darted forward, moved by some wild impulse to fling her puny strength into the scale against the outlaw.
