The girl, her heart beating tumultuously, crept on hands and knees to the crumbling edge of the bluff.
She knew its scarred face well. There were outcropping boulders, gravel pits, ledges of shale, brush clumps and a few ragged trees clinging tenaciously to the water-worn gullies.
She expected to see the man crushed and bleeding on some rock below. Perhaps he had rolled clear to the bottom.
But as her swift gaze searched the face of the bluff, there was no rock, splotched with red, in her line of vision. Then she saw something in the top of one of the trees, far down.
It was the yellow handkerchief which the stranger had worn. It fluttered in the evening breeze like a flag of distress.
“E-e-e-yow!” cried Helen, making a horn of her hands as she leaned over the edge of the precipice, and uttering the puncher’s signal call.
“E-e-e-yow!” came up a faint reply.
She saw the green top of the tree stir. Then a face—scratched and streaked with blood—appeared.
“For the love of heaven!” called a thin voice. “Get somebody with a rope. I’ve got to have some help.”
“I have a rope right here. Pass it under your arms, and I’ll swing you out of that tree-top,” replied Helen, promptly.