Down came a great deluge of water. Ned, who was slightly in the lead, urged his horse forward. The others were about to follow when they saw Ned suddenly disappear from sight off the trail, as if he had fallen into some hole.
“Ned! Ned!” cried Jerry. “What happened?”
[CHAPTER XXVI]
A BLUE ROCK SLIDE
Amid the silence that followed Jerry’s ringing cry—a silence that came after that great crash—there was no answer from Ned. He seemed absolutely to have vanished from the scene.
For a moment a sense of impending, if not actual, disaster held them all motionless. Then Tinny cried:
“Come on! We’ve got to get Ned!”
But Jerry, swinging his horse across the trail, barred for an instant the progress of Mallison.
“Wait!” shouted Jerry above the howling of the wind and the pattering of the rain. “Don’t ride your horse there! The trail may have gone down in a landslide!”