“Four to five thousand feet,” said Joses. “Can’t tell for certain. Chap would fall a long way before he found bottom, and then he’d bounce off, and go on again and again. I don’t think the mountain sheep would jump here.”
As they sat resting and inhaling the fresh breeze that blew over the widespreading plain, Bart could not help noticing the remains of a grand old pine that had once grown right at the edge of the stupendous precipice, but had gradually been storm-beaten and split in its old age till the trunk and a few jagged branches only remained.
One of these projected from its stunted trunk close down by the roots, and seemed thrust out at right angles over the precipice in a way that somehow seemed to tempt Bart.
He turned his eyes from it again and again, but that branch fascinated him, and he found himself considering how dangerous it would be, and yet how delightful, to climb right out on that branch till it bent and bent, and would bear him no further, and then sitting astride, dance up and down in mid air, right over the awful depths below.
So strange was the attraction that Bart found his hands wet with perspiration, and a peculiar feeling of horror attacked him; but what was more strange, the desire to risk his life kept growing upon him, and as he afterwards told himself, he would no doubt have made the mad venture if something had not happened to take his attention.
Joses was leaning back with half-closed eyes, enjoying his cigárito, and Bart was half rising to his knees to go back and round to where the branch projected, just to try it, he told himself, when they heard a shout away to the left, and that shout acted like magic upon Bart.
“Why, that’s Sam,” he said, drawing a breath full of relief, just as if he had awakened from some terrible nightmare.
“I’d ’bout forgotten him,” said Joses lazily. “Ahoy! Oho!—eh!” he shouted back. Then there was another shout and a rustling of bushes, a grunting noise, and Bart seized his rifle.
“He has found game,” he said.
Then he nearly let fall his piece, and knelt there as if turned to stone, for, to his horror, he suddenly saw Sam down upon his hands and knees crawling straight out on the great gnarled branch that overhung the precipice, keeping to this mode of progression for a time, and then letting his legs go down one on each side of the branch, and hitching himself along, yelling lustily the while for help.