By then, the dust had entirely cleared away below and a strange spectacle presented itself to the eyes of the lad on the brink.
Ten or fifteen feet down, the steep, smooth wall was broken by a shelf. The shelf was no more than a foot and a half in width, and a stunted bush was growing at its edge. The stranger’s body had met the obstruction in its fall, and was now lying on the shelf, wedged in between the bush and the face of the cliff.
The stranger lay quietly in his perilous berth, half on his back with face upturned. He could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen years of age, and he wore a faded shirt of blue flannel, corduroy trousers, and tight, high-heeled boots.
Those cowboy boots, constructed for riding rather than for walking, had undoubtedly got him into his dangerous predicament. They had given him no firm foothold in alighting from his sudden jump, and he had fallen and rolled from the edge of the cliff.
“Get up on your feet!” called Clancy, “I’ll lower myself as far as I can and try to take your hand and pull you up.”
“Nary, pard,” came the answer. “I reckon as how I’d better imitate a piece of bloomin’ brick-a-braw on a mantel-shelf. If I get to squirmin’, that bit of brush pulls out and lets me down. See how it is? Throw down a rope.”
“I haven’t a rope.”
“Then, by glory, I opine I was born to be busted in fraggyments at the foot of this here clift. Why ever ain’t you got a rope?”
The stranger seemed composed enough, and certainly he took a very peculiar view of the situation. He wasn’t frightened—at least not so Clancy could notice it.
“You’ve got to up end yourself somehow!” declared Clancy. “Straighten yourself upright along the wall and reach as high as you can. Maybe our hands will meet.”