Without making a sound that would alarm her, Alan had stumbled, and made pretense of falling.  He lay upon his face for a moment, as if stunned, and then rose to his knees.  An instant too late Graham’s men saw his ruse when his leveled rifle gleamed in the sunshine.  The speed of their pursuit was their undoing.  Trying to catch themselves so that they might use their rifles, or fling themselves upon the ground, they brought themselves into a brief but deadly interval of inaction, and in that flash one of the men went down under Alan’s first shot.  Before he could fire again the second had flattened himself upon the earth, and swift as a fox Alan was on his feet and racing for the kloof.  Mary stood with her back against the huge rock, gasping for breath, when he joined her.  A bullet sang over their heads with its angry menace.  He did not return the fire, but drew the girl quickly behind the rock.

“He won’t dare to stand up until the others join him,” he encouraged her.  “We’re beating them to it, little girl!  If you can keep up a few minutes longer—­”

She smiled at him, even as she struggled to regain her breath.  It seemed to her there was no way of descending into the chaos of rock between the gloomy walls of the kloof, and she gave a little cry when Alan caught her by her hands and lowered her over the face of a ledge to a table-like escarpment below.  He laughed at her fear when he dropped down beside her, and held her close as they crept back under the shelving face of the cliff to a hidden path that led downward, with a yawning chasm at their side.  The trail widened as they descended, and at the last they reached the bottom, with the gloom and shelter of a million-year-old crevasse hovering over them.  Grim and monstrous rocks, black and slippery with age, lay about them, and among these they picked their way, while the trickle and drip of water and the flesh-like clamminess of the air sent a strange shiver of awe through Mary Standish.  There was no life here—­only an age-old whisper that seemed a part of death; and when voices came from above, where Graham’s men were gathering, they were ghostly and far away.

But here, too, was refuge and safety.  Mary could feel it as they picked their way through the chill and gloom that lay in the silent passages between the Gargantuan rocks.  When her hands touched their naked sides an uncontrollable impulse made her shrink closer to Alan, even though she sensed the protection of their presence.  They were like colossi, carved by hands long dead, and now guarded by spirits whose voices guttered low and secretly in the mysterious drip and trickle of unseen water.  This was the haunted place.  In this chasm death and vengeance had glutted themselves long before she was born; and when a rock crashed behind them, accidentally sent down by one of the men above, a cry broke from her lips.  She was frightened, and in a way she had never known before.  It was not death she feared here, nor the horror from which she had escaped above, but something unknown and indescribable, for which she would never be able to give a reason.  She clung to Alan, and when at last the narrow fissure widened over their heads, and light came down and softened their way, he saw that her face was deathly white.