He whirled to an about face in a flash. “Where are you?” he called.
The cry was repeated, apparently coming from a mass of shadow, to his left, and farther down the slope. He plunged on into the gloom.
“I’ll find out what’s back of this if it takes a leg,” he declared to himself.
The next moment he stumbled over some obstacle, and fell forward. He threw out his hands instinctively to ease his fall, but they came in contact with nothing more substantial than thin air.
He dropped through space—not far, yet far enough to give him quite a jolt when he landed on the hard rocks. After a moment he scrambled to a sitting posture and rubbed his bruised shins.
On every side of him the gloom was thick. He could look up, however, and see an oblong patch of sky, studded with stars.
“Thunder!” he exclaimed ruefully. “There’s an open cut on the slope, and I’ve stumbled into it. That’s what a fellow gets for tracking trouble over ground he doesn’t know anything about. But that cry for help! It certainly gets my goat.”
He had lost his cap in his fall, and he groped around in the dark until he found it. Then, getting to his feet, he made his way to the steep bank and began climbing.
An “open cut” is a gouge in the earth made for purposes of exploration. Usually an “open cut” is dug or blasted out in order to make sure of surface indications of a vein, and sometimes it is made in the hunt for a vein that has been lost.
Yet it made little difference how or what that particular open cut was there. The fact of most importance to Merry was that he had fallen into it.