He was foremost, and had reached a tremendous piled-up wall of masses of mossy stone, whose crevices formed a gorgeous rockery of flowers and greenery, wonderful to behold, almost perpendicular, but so full of inequalities that offered such excellent foot and hand hold that there was very little difficulty in the ascent. He began at once seizing creeper and root, and was about half way up, when there was a snarling yell, and a great cat-like creature sprang out of a dark crevice, bounded upward and was gone, while Panton, startled into loosening his hold as the brute brushed by him, came scrambling and falling down, till he was checked by his friends.
“Hurt?” cried Oliver, excitedly.
“Hurt!” was the reply, in an angry tone, “just see if you can come down twenty or thirty feet without hurting yourself.”
“But no bones broken?” said Drew.
“How should I know? Oh, hang it, how I’ve hurt my poor shoulder again.”
Irritation, more than injury, was evidently the result of the fall, for as he knelt down to bathe a cut upon one of his hands, Panton exclaimed,—
“One of you might have shot the brute. Only let me catch a glimpse of him again.”
“There wasn’t time,” said Oliver. “But don’t you think we had better give up the excursion for to-day?”
“No, I don’t,” cried Panton. “Think I’ve taken all this trouble for nothing,” and, rising to his feet again, he took his gun from where he had stood it, and began to climb once more in and out among the pendent vines and creepers till he was at the top, and the others followed, but did not reach his side without being bitten and stung over and over again by the ants and winged insects which swarmed.
“There, what do you say to that?” cried Panton, forgetting his injuries and pointing downward.