The Peril Finders

by George Manville Fenn

The boy’s answer took the form of obedience.

Glancing upward to see that he was quite hidden, and again at the ledge from which the arrows had come, Chris passed his rifle-sling over his head and one shoulder, got the piece well over his back, and flattening himself down upon his chest, edged himself along to get his head a little beyond the stone of shelter so that he could look down, when he turned icy with the shiver that ran up his spine. For he was gazing down a perpendicular portion of the cliff-face to a patch of bushes fully two hundred feet below.

“Oh, it’s impossible!” he cried; but as he uttered the words once more the command came up—

“Try!”

“Ah, he doesn’t know,” groaned the boy despairingly, as he shrank shivering back to his old position, to lie still for a minute, feeling the palms of his hands grow wet. But the sound of that word try seemed to be echoing on his ear, and thrusting himself more away from the edge of the shelf over which he had peered, he wrenched his head round to see whether there was any possible ledge or slope on the other side of the stone where he had looked before and had seen as it were that it projected right out.

Once more his heart seemed to leap, for as he looked after backing a little more, he could see that his feet rested on a ledge formed by one band of the shale projecting about a foot beyond that above, while two yards or so beyond this ledge was broken sharply away.

What was beyond he could not see, but the ledge was certainly safer than the spot he occupied, there being room for him to lie down, and, better still, he could see that he would be better screened from any attack made from the ledge or the clump of bushes, the stone and an angle of the cliff being between the ledge and the dangerous foes.

It was a case of its being only the first step that costs. Chris had begun to try, and forcing himself backward along the ledge inch by inch, he soon had the satisfaction of feeling that he was more hidden from the danger of being shot at than he expected, while the cliff-wall at whose foot he lay completely screened him from above.

There was a hopefulness about this, a feeling of being rewarded for his effort to try, which nerved the boy to continue, in spite of the difficulties attending his backward progress and the way in which his rifle caught against the wall, and his having to stop again and again to readjust the holster of his revolver, which kept on slipping round.

“This going backward is horrible,” he said to himself at last, as he paused rather out of breath to look anxiously about him, but felt in better heart upon again seeing how thoroughly he was screened from the Indians. The danger was not there, and he had nothing to mind on one side where the rock-wall went right up, probably to the tableland above, which, for aught he knew to the contrary, might come right to the edge of the mass of earth and stone. That which he had to fear was the horrible vacancy on his left, over which, had he cared to, he could have stretched out his hand; but though more than once tempted to do so, he shrank from it with a shudder.