“I guess we shall have to give it up,” he shouted to Harry, who, unable to catch a syllable in the thunderous din, but understanding the trouble, pointed ahead and yelled:
“There’s a chance to make your way through to something else!”
Neither did Little Rifle hear a word uttered by his comrade, but the motion of his lips, and the gesture of his hand indicated sufficiently well what he meant.
Following the direction indicated, he saw through a thin sheet of water, scarcely thicker than the soap bubble, and that reflected the prismatic hues, the dark outlines of a rock, that scarcely was as high as his waist and which was within easy leaping distance.
Not a second was to be lost, and Little Rifle had no sooner detected it than he made a spring, cleaving through the gauzy vail, and striking the flat surface of the rock, which was so slippery that his feet slid forward, and he fell flat upon his back.
Before he could gather himself up, Harry followed, and he too sprawled at full length, neither receiving any injury, and both assuming the perpendicular almost at the same moment.
The fear of Little Rifle was that by plunging through the feathery sheet, and temporarily breaking it, they had dissolved it altogether, and failing to reunite, it would leave not only the rock upon which they stood, but themselves, in full view of the Blackfeet, as soon as they should descend the rocks and place themselves below the falls.
But the screen instantly resumed its normal place, and spread over them like a fan of the thinnest glass, shutting them in, but permitting them to look through upon the outer world. Its transparency, or rather its texture, however, was not like that of a perfect window-pane, but it was faulty, abounding with tremulous nebulæ here and there that gave a fanciful, grotesque imagery to the objects upon which the eye rested, and that as a consequence, made the picture of themselves equally untrue to nature.
Still, although they had reasonably increased their chances of eluding the Blackfeet, they were in danger, so long as they maintained their present position, and both cast about to discover what their facilities were in the way of a further retreat.
The result was better than they dared to hope. The sheet of water that poured over their heads was fully a hundred feet in width, and the black, slippery rock stretched clean across beneath it, with a width varying from ten to a dozen feet.