“And come again.” For come again he would till he had found poor Leather, “unless,” he said to himself with a shudder, “he has fallen down this terrible place.”
And yet it was not terrible, he thought the next moment. It was grand, glorious, lovely, and the shelf below him, with its water, more tempting than anything he had ever seen before.
“I must get down,” he said; and going farther along he sought for a means, but had not far to go, for he soon grasped the fact that this shelf was only some eighty or a hundred feet off the top, which had slipped a little and then stopped. It had broken away, gone down some fifty feet, and then been checked.
While as he gazed down at the old edge of the precipice, and over it into the gorge below, he could hear the soft, whistling, humming trickle of the water, and it increased his eagerness. He must get down, he thought—but how? There were no overhanging boughs, no roots which had forced their way between cracks in the rock and gone on down and down searching for the moisture of that tiny rill which went over the edge to its present depth; and there were no stout bushes growing in the side beneath him. All there was clean, broken-away stone, which could only be descended by stepping from projection to projection, while if any one slipped—
“Well, what if he did?” said the boy contemptuously, as he gazed down: “he would, at the most, only get a few scratches and bruises. Here’s the best spot, and I’m going down.”
Without further hesitation he laid down his gun, turned upon his breast and lowered his legs, found footing easy to get upon a ledge, and lowered himself more and more till he was at the full stretch of his limbs, when a horrible thought occurred to him: suppose, when he jumped down upon that broad shelf formed by a sliding of the rock till it was checked by some inequality, his weight should be sufficient to start it going again, and he should be carried with it backward into the gulf.
“What nonsense!” he thought; “why, my weight upon it will be no more than that of a fly;” and he lowered himself a little more, found it harder, moved to the right, and got on to a firm ledge, and from that to another, and was soon half-way down.
There he came to a stop, for he could find neither foot nor hand hold; and there he was at last, spread-eagled against the perpendicular rock, unable to go down, and, upon determining to go up instead, utterly unable to retrace his steps.
“Oh, this is absurd,” he thought, and looking sidewise, he saw a little projection which seemed as if it would do then, feeling that if he stopped longer in his cramped position he would be less able to act, he measured the distance with his eyes, gathered himself together, made a clumsy spring, got a foot on the projection, but missed the crevice into which he meant to thrust his right hand, and went scrambling and sliding down the other five-and-twenty feet, to come into a sitting position on the broken stones, scratched, bruised, and uttering a loud groan of pain.