Десмонд Бэгли: Wyatt's Hurricane

There was no answer. Everything was silent save for the distant roar of a helicopter landing at the bottom of the valley.

‘We’ll go a bit further,’ said Dawson. ‘Perhaps they’re lower down. Perhaps they’ve left already — gone down to the valley.’

‘They wouldn’t do that,’ objected Wyatt. ‘Rawsthorne knows that the St Michel road is easier.’

‘Okay, perhaps they’ve gone that way.’

‘We’ll look down here first,’ said Wyatt. He began to climb among the tumbled rocks at the bottom of the ravine, wading through pools, heedless of the water. Dawson followed him, and kept a careful watch all round. From time to time Wyatt shouted, and then they paused to listen but heard no answering cry.

After a while Dawson said, ‘That Warmington cow said something about a waterfall. You see anything that could have been a waterfall?’

‘No,’ said Wyatt shortly.

They went further down the ravine and found themselves enclosed within its sheer walls. ‘This would be as good a place to sit out a hurricane as any,’ commented Dawson. ‘Better than the goddam holes we had.’

‘Then where the hell are they?’ demanded Wyatt, losing his temper.

‘Take it easy,’ said Dawson. ‘We’ll find them if they’re here. I’ll tell you what; you carry on down the ravine, and I’ll get up on the hillside. I can move faster up there and still see most of what there is to be seen down here.’

He climbed up the ravine wall and regained the open hillside, and as he thought, he was immediately able to keep up a better speed. Even though he was hampered by fallen trees, they were easier to negotiate than the jumble of rocks in the ravine. He carried on down the hill, outstripping Wyatt, and returned to the lip of the ravine frequently to scan the bottom very carefully. It was quite a while before he found anything.

At first he thought it was some kind of animal moving very slowly, and then his breath hissed as he saw it was a man crawling painfully on his belly. He climbed down to the bottom and stumbled across the rocks to where the crawling figure had stopped. When he turned the man over he lifted his head and yelled, ‘Wyatt, come here — I’ve found Rawsthorne!’

Rawsthorne was in a bad way. His face was deathly pale, accentuating the blood streaks on the side of his head. His right side appeared to be completely paralysed and he made ineffectual pawing movements with his left arm as Dawson gently cradled him. His eyes flickered open and his lips moved but he made no sound.

‘Take it easy,’ said Dawson. ‘You’re safe now.’

Rawsthorne’s breath rasped and he whispered, ‘Heart... heart... attack.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Dawson. ‘Relax.’

Small stones clattered as Wyatt came up, and Dawson turned his head. ‘The poor guy’s had a heart attack. He’s not too good.’

Wyatt took Rawsthorne’s wrist and felt the faint thread of pulse and then looked into the glazing eyes which seemed focused an infinity away. The grey lips moved again. ‘Waterfall... tree... tree...’

Rawsthorne suddenly sagged and lay in Dawson’s arms, gazing vacantly at the sky, his jaw dropped open.

Dawson eased him down on to the rocks. ‘He’s dead.’

Wyatt stared down at the body and his face looked haggard. ‘Was he crawling?’ he whispered.

Dawson nodded. ‘He was going down the ravine. I don’t know how he expected to make it.’

‘Julie would never have left him,’ said Wyatt in an over-controlled voice. ‘Not if he was sick. Something must have happened to her.’

‘He said something about a waterfall, too — just like Warmington.’

‘It must be higher up,’ said Wyatt. ‘And I think I know where it is.’ He rose to his feet and stumbled away, moving much too fast for the broken ground and reckless of twisted or broken ankles. Dawson followed him more cautiously and found him beneath an outcrop of rock too hard and stubborn to be worn away. He stooped and picked up something from the cleft in the base of the rock. It was a woman’s purse.

‘This was Warmington’s,’ he said. ‘This is the waterfall.’ His head jerked upwards to the tangle of tree roots above his head on the edge of the ravine. ‘And that’s the tree — he said “tree”, didn’t he?’

He scrambled up the side of the ravine and then turned to give a hand to Dawson. ‘Let’s have a closer look at this bloody tree.’

They walked around the tree and saw nothing, and then Wyatt pushed in among the branches and suddenly gave a choked sound. ‘She’s here,’ he said brokenly.

Dawson pushed his way through and looked over Wyatt’s shoulder, then turned away. He said heavily, ‘Well — we found her.’

She was lying with the trunk of the tree across her legs and hips and a branch across her right arm, pinning it to the ground. The fingertips of her left hand were scraped bloodily raw where she had scrabbled at the trunk in her efforts to move it. Her face, smudged with dirt, was otherwise marble-white and drained of blood, and the only thing about her that moved was a strand of her hair that waved gently in the wind.

Wyatt stepped back away from the tree and looked at it calculatingly. He said in a repressed voice, ‘Let’s move this tree. Let’s shift this damned tree.’

‘Dave,’ said Dawson quietly, ‘she’s dead.’

Wyatt turned in a flash, his face furious. ‘We don’t know,’ he shouted. ‘We don’t know that.’

Dawson fell back a step, intimidated by the controlled violence emanating from this man. He said, ‘All right, Dave. We’ll move the tree.’

‘And we’ll do it carefully, do you hear?’ said Wyatt. ‘We’ll do it very carefully.’

Dawson looked at the tree dubiously. It was big and heavy and awkward. ‘How do we start?’

Wyatt attacked a broken branch and wrenched it free by sheer force. He stepped back panting. ‘We take the weight off her... her body, then one of us can draw her out.’

That did not look so easy to Dawson, but he was willing to give it a try. He took the branch which Wyatt offered and walked round the tree looking for a convenient place to wedge it under the trunk. Wyatt collected some rocks and followed him. ‘There,’ he said abruptly. ‘That’s the place.’ His face was very white. ‘We must be careful.’

Dawson rammed the branch beneath the trunk and cautiously tested the leverage. He doubted if the trunk would move but said nothing. Wyatt pushed him out of the way and swung his weight on to the branch. There was a creak, but otherwise nothing. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You can push on this, too.’

‘Who is going to push the stones under?’ asked Dawson reasonably. ‘Neither of us can do it if we’re both heaving on that branch.’

‘I can do it with my foot,’ said Wyatt impatiently. ‘Come on.’

Both of them leaned heavily on the branch and Dawson felt an agony of pain in his hands. The trunk of the tree moved fractionally and he set his teeth and held on. Slowly the trunk lifted, inch by inch, and Wyatt, both his feet off the ground, nudged one of the rocks with the tip of his shoe until it slid underneath. Then another, a larger one, went under, and he gasped, ‘That’s enough — for now.’

Slowly they released the branch and the trunk settled again, but it was slightly raised on the rocks. Dawson staggered back, his hands aflame with pain, and Wyatt looked up and saw his face. ‘What’s the matter?’ Then he caught on. ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.’

Dawson suppressed the sickness that welled up within him and grinned weakly. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘There’s nothing to it. I’m all right.’

‘Are you sure?’