“I OPINE it’s got to be done.”
Once more Silas and the baronet stood upon the brink of the great abyss which had barred further progress upon their first journey.
“You see, it’s this way,” Haverly went on: “there’s just a glimmer of a chance that Garth and Mervyn are still alive. It ain’t the general thing with savages to kill their prisoners off-hand, and I guess these wolf-men are no exception to the rule. That being so, we may still be in time to pull this job off if we adopt my plan. You’ll allow that if we’ve got to foot it twenty or thirty miles along the edge of this yer crevice, we’re safe to arrive considerable too late for business?”
“Tramping along the brink on the chance of finding a place sufficiently narrow for us to jump is utterly out of the question,” replied Seymour. “Your plan is really the only feasible one, although it sounds decidedly risky.”
“Then here goes,” cried the millionaire. He flung himself down upon the very verge of the chasm, and, leaning far over, hauled up the dangling ropes which had formed the bridge.
With Seymour’s aid he cut the fastenings that bound it to the rocky brink; then the twain applied themselves to the task of unlashing the cross-ties, a piece of work that proved very tedious, and which was accomplished with no little difficulty.
It was finished at length, though, and then Haverly skilfully knotted the two long strands, each of which was about thirty feet in length, testing the knots again and again to assure himself of their firmness.
“I guess that’ll hold,” he remarked; “if it gives at all it won’t be at the knots.”
At one end of this hide rope he made a running noose, and, coiling it lasso-fashion about his arm, he rose.
“Now for a suitable rock to sling it over,” he went on, “and then we’ll have a first-class bridge: a bit fragile, perhaps, but ‘needs must when the old man drives,’ you know.”