"Yes, I believe this will do."
By the way he poked about among the loose rocks and stones, and scratched in the sand with a short stick he had cut in the scrub, it looked as though he were doing a little prospecting for gold on his own account. But the thought that there was gold above the fall as well as below it had not entered his head. Had he been a practical gold digger he would have recognised at once, from the nature of the stones about him, that he was amongst the gold-bearing rocks, or rather that the stones were fragments, brought down from the mountain, of auriferous quartz.
Having satisfied himself of the practicability of his plan by this personal survey, he leaped across the stream, and keeping along the edge of the cliff he soon stood above the place in the main ravine where they had camped. He saw his brother below him putting the finishing stitches to his work, and taking up a little pebble he threw it so that it almost dropped on the hat of the unconscious Alec. Geordie greeted him with a stave of a song as Alec leaped to his feet and looked around, and danced a little corroborree, all of his own invention, so near to the edge of the cliff that Alec was almost frightened out of his senses.
"Come down, you young ape!" he yelled.
"Ape yourself," replied Geordie; but he instantly swung himself over the edge and began descending at a break-neck pace, and in a moment he stood by the side of his brother.
"You'll break your neck as sure as fate if you fling yourself about like that. I never saw such a fellow as you are; you are just like a cat on your feet. Where have you been?"
"In the waterfall, up the waterfall, and over the waterfall, and I have come to the conclusion that the waterfall is but a poor creature, and that we can manage it after all."
"Manage it! What do you mean?"
"I mean what I say, and I think you will agree with me when you hear my plan, and have examined the stream before it falls from the cliff."
"Plan! what plan?"