The enemy were now literally swarming up the steps and sides of the stairway.
Jack gave the word—“Blaze away!” and a double report went hurtling wildly out over the sea.
Clubbing their muskets, they then fell upon and began clubbing the escaladers with an energy that speedily choked the contracted avenue of approach to the summit of the Rock with a heaving, scrambling, trampling mass of natives, whose desperate struggles to regain their lost foothold upon the steps only served to facilitate their descent to the bottom. In five minutes' time the repulse was complete; the foe retreated into the dark security of the chasm, leaving some six or eight of their number lying upon the scene of the affray. Jack threw aside his musket and sprang: down the steps to where they lay.
“What are you after now?” cried Don, leaping down after him.
“Cloths,” was Jack's laconic rejoinder, as he unceremoniously began to divest the natives of the long strips of country cotton that encircled their waists. “We want these for our rope.”
On hearing this Don also set to work, and in a short time they had secured some half-dozen cloths, together with an equal number of turbans, which lay scattered all up and down the steps like enormous mushrooms. With this booty they returned in triumph to the summit of the rock.
“They'll average twelve feet at least,” said Jack, eyeing the tumbled heap critically. “Let's see—twelve twelves make a hundred and forty-four; and by tearing them in two down the middle we'll get double length. Total, two hundred and eighty-eight feet. Hurrah, we've got our rope!”
“And a far safer one,” observed Don, “than if we had patched it up out of those palm-leaves. Well, it's an ill wind that—-”
He got no further, for Jack suddenly dropped at his feet as though he had been shot. He had fainted from loss of blood, as Don, to his horror, quickly discovered. As a matter of fact, the knife that had penetrated Jack's arm was still in the wound, and its projecting hilt was the first intimation Don received of his chum's hairbreadth escape. By the time he had removed the knife, ripped open the coat-sleeve, and bandaged the wound with a fragment torn from one of the cloths, Jack opened his eyes.
“Why didn't you tell me about this?” exclaimed Don reproachfully. “How did it happen?”