He was too dazed for a moment to realize what had happened; and then, presently, the awful truth broke over him.
Dell had slipped from the brink of the cliff, and was suspended in mid-air by the steel cuff and the short length of chain!
On the strength of the cuffs and the chain hung the girl’s life!
Buffalo Bill was a powerful man, fibered with nerves of steel and muscles of iron; and Dell, although she was slender, was compactly built, and of more than the average weight for a girl of her inches.
In considering the perilous situation into which the scout and the girl were thus suddenly plunged, it must be remembered that they had just emerged from another condition of baffling mystery which had tried them body and mind.
It was physical unsteadiness which had caused Dell to slip over the brink of the precipice while the scout was staggering across the trail in an attempt to locate the place whence his pard’s voice proceeded.
The truth, when it finally dawned on the scout, broke over him like a thunderclap.
He could not see Dell, for she was swinging below the brink; and he knew that she was swinging there by the awful pull on his right wrist and arm. It seemed to him as though the arm was being gradually drawn from its socket.
All that kept him from going over the edge with Dell and dropping to the depths of the gulch was his hold on the small tree which grew out of the rock crevices.
Buffalo Bill’s faculties were all taken up with the predicament that immediately faced himself and Dell. Suddenly his eyes, close to the ground, turned up the trail. He saw two painted forms creeping down relentlessly upon him and the girl.
Had those redskins, at that moment, stood over the scout with uplifted knives, he could not have made the slightest move in his own defense.
The scout turned his eyes away from the creeping savages with a stifled groan. Not a sound came from the form that hung below the brink. What the girl’s thoughts must have been, providing she retained the full use of her faculties, may readily be imagined.
The terrific strain was as trying to Dauntless Dell as it was to the iron muscles of Buffalo Bill. The Indians were coming; and where was Nomad?
Buffalo Bill had been so wrapped up in his own life-and-death struggle at the cliff’s edge that, for a time, he had ceased to think of Nomad. Abruptly, thoughts of the old trapper darted through the scout’s brain.