“I ain’t going to wear out any fingers!” Jack insisted. “You remember that great big jack-knife? The one you said ought to cause my arrest for carrying concealed weapons? Well, I’ve got that jack-knife with me right now. I’m going to break the big blade off short and dig into the rock with that all the way down!”
“What do you want to break the blade off for?” asked Frank.
“So I can get my hand close to the point of contact without cutting my fingers off,” replied Jack.
“I wish I had a knife like that,” Frank said, regretfully.
“Well,” Jack proposed in a moment, “we can bunch in together and each one can have a hand on the knife. Say, but won’t that be a jolly proposition? Wearing out a perfectly good Boy Scout uniform on the dirty old rocks of the Devil’s Punch Bowl?”
“Any way to get down to the bottom!” Frank declared.
The plan figured out by Jack worked to perfection, and the boys reached the edge of the pool without tumbling in. Still, however, they were not within reach of the spot where their chum was lying.
During all this time, Harry had shown not the slightest evidence of life. Crumpled up as from a fatal blow, the boy lay exactly in the position into which he had fallen.
“We made the slide on the down-grade, all right. Now I wish we could slide up over the spur that separates us from the side of the pool where Harry is,” Jack said.
“All we’ve got to do is to climb,” Frank answered. “I never saw any ledge of rock, or any body of water, or any trouble of any kind, that you could wish yourself over.”