'No!' he sang out, 'there's no one on; let the rope go again, there must be some mistake.'
Again the rope swung into the crevice, was caught, held, and returned, and again no one was on it.
This time the men hauled it up, thinking Towzer must have found some fault in the rope. All that they found was a note and these words: 'Dear Frank, forgive; I know I'm a little idiot, but I can't come. I should go mad if I saw myself hanging by that thread. I'll stay here until to-morrow, and then perhaps I can get down and up some other way. Don't mind me, it's awfully jolly here.—TOWZER.'
'"Awfully jolly here!" poor little chap, he's got the horrors, and if we leave him he'll go looking over until he can't help throwing himself down,' said Dick. 'Let's go to him, one of us.'
'No!' said Frank, and his voice sounded hard and cruel, and his fair skin was all aflame, 'we'll send this down, please;' and with shaking hand he wrote: 'For shame, remember you are a Winthrop; will you let these fellows see that you are afraid?'
At his word the two sound men lowered the rope again, and this time when the tugs came there was a weight at the end of it—a weight that swung and spun and tried their strength more even than Frank had done. At last they dragged him to the top, and as his head came over the edge they looked to see his hands grip the ground, but in vain! Like a log he rolled on the top and lay there, his head hanging limply, like the head of a dead snowdrop, and Frank wrung his hands as he thought that his pride had killed 'the little one.'
'It's all right, pard, don't you take on like that,' said Wharton cheerfully; 'he's swooned away or gone to sleep with dizziness. He'll come round again directly.'
Picking the boy up gently, they got him across to the nest, as Dick called the hollow by the balloon.
'Better carry him like this than if he was awake and mad with fright, poor chap,' said Wharton; and then, when he had rolled his charge up in a buffalo-robe, and poured some spirits from the flask down his throat, he begged the other two to lie down and rest.
'We shall want all our strength if we mean living through the next few days,' said the old foreman, 'and I can't do with more nor one invalid at a time.'