“I can’t: I don’t know. I think I can climb out, only I hardly like to stir for fear of a slip. Here goes, though. I can’t stay like this.”
Mike stood gazing down at the bushes, trembling with anxiety as he heard a rustling and scraping sound beneath, which made him long to speak and ask questions about how his companion got on, but he feared to do so lest he should take his attention from the work he had on hand. Then came the rattle of a falling stone going slowly down, as if there were a good, steady slope; and the boy listened for its plunge into water far beneath, but the falling of the stone ceased to be heard, while the rustling and scraping sound made by the climber increased. Then all at once the bushes began to move and a hand appeared at the far end.
“Take care! pray take care!” cried Mike. “Don’t—pray don’t slip back!”
“Oh, it’s all right now,” said Vince, to the watcher’s great relief. “It’s all of a slope here, as if it had once been a place where water ran down. Wait a moment till I get out my knife.”
There was a pause, during which Mike climbed round to the end where Vince was trying to get out; and he was there by the time his companion began hacking at the brambles with his big knife, first his arm appearing and soon after his head, as he chopped away, getting himself free, and seizing the hand extended to him from where Mike knelt and reached down.
“Hah!” cried Vince, as he climbed on to one of the rugged blocks, “that wasn’t nice. It slopes down from here, so that where I fell through I must have dropped a dozen feet; but I came down standing, and then fell this way on my hands and stopped myself from sliding, when a lot of stones that had been waiting for a touch went down.”
“But are you hurt?” cried Mike anxiously.
“Not much: bit bruised, I suppose. But I say, isn’t it rum? There must have been water running to make a place like that. It must have come all along the bottom, where we’ve been creeping, and run down here, eating its way, like your father and mine were talking about one evening.”
“I’d forgotten,” said Mike. “But if it ran down there, where did it go to?”
“Down to the sea, of course, and— I say, Mike, don’t you see?” cried Vince excitedly.