“I—I’ve made a monkey’s fist of this, all right,” muttered Darrel. “If I’d left you alone, Chip, you’d have got the ball with ground to spare. But I had to try to star myself, and this is what comes of it.”
“Don’t fret about that, old man,” said Merry. “The thing to do now is to have the arm attended to.”
“Why don’t you take him to the camp?” asked Ballard. “We could get there in a mighty small part of the time it would take to reach Dolliver’s.”
“Darrel has got to have a comfortable bed, for one thing, Pink,” Merry answered. “Mainly, though, we can use the phone from Dolliver’s and get the doctor out from Ophir by motor car. By going to the ranch at the mouth of the cañon, we’ll not only save time, but make Darrel more comfortable into the bargain.”
“What happened to me?” queried Darrel, smothering his pain with a heroic effort. “Did I drop all the way down the cliff wall? I can’t remember a thing after hitting the shelf.”
“You rolled off the shelf and lodged on a bowlder,” Frank answered. “We got you down by means of the rope.”
“‘We’ didn’t have a thing to do with it,” spoke up Ballard. “It was Chip did it all, Darrel. He swarmed up the side of the cliff with the rope, took a half hitch around a bit of a tree, and then lowered——”
“Don’t worry him with all that,” struck in Merry. “Just lie as quietly as you can, Darrel. Here, put your head on this.”
Jerking off his coat, he rolled it up for a pillow, and Darrel was gently lowered until he was lying at full length on the rocks. His eyes closed. Although he made no sound, yet the contracting muscles of his face showed that he was fighting hard with pain.
At last a clatter of hoofs announced the coming of Clancy with two led horses. Handy and the rest had not returned from up the cañon, and Clancy had seen nothing of Fritz, Silva, or the professor. Because of his failure to see anybody at the camp, he had been unable to report the accident.