“So I will, Master Nic—barrowload if you like. You get me an old canister. There’ll be some nice fat uns down aside where I grows my cowcumbers. Ah! I never thought, when I got digging ’em out o’ the side of the cowcumber beds at home, I should ever get making on ’em out here, t’other side o’ the world.”
Nic fetched a bag instead of a canister, and soon after stood ready to start.
“You go same way as I took yer that night, Master Nic, and then work your way up for a hour or so, and all under they tree-ferns you’ll find pools and pools with lots o’ fish in ’em; but I don’t know how you’re going to get on with that long thin clothes-prop of a thing. But, there, you’re a gen’leman, and I s’pose you knows best.”
“Well, I shall try with it, Sam,” said Nic, laughing.
“Ay, sir, do, and good luck to you. Now I’ll get back to my hoeing.”
Nic shouldered his rod, and with his basket in his hand he left the garden, went round by the wooden building set apart for the men, and then struck across the open ground for the gully, where he soon came upon the tree-bridge he had crossed that moonlight night in company with old Sam; and he could not help hesitating for a few moments as he looked down into the narrow, dark rift, along which the water was rushing far below, while the noise of the waterfall was hollow, reverberating, and strange.
Nic took a long breath, and looked at the tree, which had been felled so that it tumbled right across the rift, and then worked with an adze so as to make a level surface about as wide as an ordinary plank, the lower branches being left on at the sides of the trunk and beneath.
He drew another deep breath, and noted that if he fell, unless he caught at one of these hanging branches, checked himself and managed to climb back, he must drop all that tremendous depth into the black-looking pool of water below.
He drew a third deep breath, and thought that if he had known what the place was like, old Sam would never have got him across, that first night of his coming.
Then he took another long, deeper breath than ever, and said to himself: