“Oh my bones!” he cried, with a laugh and a wince of pain, as he began to rub himself; and then, as he looked up, a sudden chill struck him, for, he said to himself:
“Why, it’s like a trap. I can never get up there again. I ought to have looked farther before I leaped.”
He limped a little as he stood up, and his arms both required a rub, especially about the elbows; but while he performed these little comforting offices he was not idle, for he carefully inspected the shelf. Escape on the one side did not seem possible, for it was over into the gorge; the other side, a curve, was one nearly perpendicular wall of rock, along which he walked from where he stood to the ends at the edge of the precipice and back.
“It is a regular pitfall,” thought Nic; and then, determined to make the best of things, he lay down upon his chest over the clear murmuring water, lowered his lips, and took a long, deep, delicious draught of the sparkling fluid.
“That’s refreshing,” said the boy to himself, and he came to a sitting position on the warm stone, took out his piece of bread cake, and looked up at the wall facing him, as he broke off a morsel of damper.
“Doesn’t look so high as it did before I had that drink,” he said, with a laugh. “Not half so high; and by the time I’ve eaten my bread it will only look half as high once more. Pooh! I can climb up. Cake’s good.”
He sat munching away contentedly enough now, stopping from time to time for a fresh draught of water; and as he ate and drank he forgot the awkwardness of his position in wonder and admiration of the mountain precipice before him, and at last crept to the edge of that upon which he had been seated, to obtain another look down into the mighty gorge.
“Ah, it’s very grand,” he sighed; “but it’s time I climbed out of this.”
He started, for he heard a sharp double click, like the cocking of a gun, and looked up behind at the edge from which he had descended.
“Cricket or grasshopper,” he thought; and then he felt, to use a familiar old saying, as if his blood ran cold; for a slight movement at the top had caught his attention, and he found himself gazing at the muzzle of his gun, so foreshortened that there seemed to be no barrel—nothing but a round hole, and behind it a glittering eye.