Somehow he did not feel in any hurry to begin, and he sat down with his legs hanging over the ledge, to give his nerves time to calm down, for there was a strong tendency to throb about his pulses, and he was not sufficiently conversant with the house he lived in, to know that confinement, worry, want of fresh air, and excessive work during the past few days had not given him what the doctors call “tone.”
So he sat there with his back to the rock, gazing out to sea again, and then watching the graceful curves made by a gull, which had risen higher and higher, and came nearer and nearer, till it was on a level with him, and watching him curiously.
“Wonder whether you think I am going to fall and let you have a pick at me,” said Archy, with a forced laugh; “because I am not going to tumble, so you can be off.”
All the same, though, he shuddered, and he had to exercise a little force to make his new start downward.
“Best way after all,” he said, as he began to descend. “If you go up, it gets more dangerous every minute, because you have farther to fall. If you go down, it gets safer, because you have less.”
He found the way now comparatively easy, for the rock sloped a little out, and he had even got down some sixty feet when he had a check.
“I don’t know, though,” he said, as he put a bleeding knuckle to his lips. “Don’t make much difference, I should think, whether you fall one hundred feet or five. Bother! I wish I did not keep on thinking about tumbling.”
He forced himself to study the next part of his descent, which was nearly perpendicular, but well broken up with ledges and cracks which offered good holding, and terminated a hundred feet below, upon a shelf, which naturally offered itself as his next resting-place, but beyond which it was impossible to see.
“Don’t matter,” he said more cheerfully. “Let’s take difficulties a bit at a time. I’m free, and I can laugh at them now. I could jump into deep water and swim, if there were no way down from below there.”
His spirits rose now, for, though a false step or slip of the foot would have sent him headlong down to the broad ledge, from which he would in all probability have bounded into the sea, the climbing was good, and, panting with the exertion, he got from projection to ledge, now straight down, now diagonally, and often along first one tiny ledge or cornice and then another, zig-zagging, till, at about twenty feet from the place he was making for, a slaty piece of the limestone rock by which he was holding parted, frost-loosened, from the parent rock, and he went down with a rush.