Upon this Pat descended, and went down cautiously and carefully, clinging with feet and hands to the rope and to the sides of the pit. He was not so dexterous as Bart, and once or twice he lost his foothold on the side of the pit, and slid for several feet, the rope cutting his hands; but still he kept on, for Bart was waiting for him, and encouraging him.
At length, when about thirty feet from the bottom, where Bart was standing, he found a place where he could stick his foot, and waited for a moment to look down through the darkness. He could see nothing. As he looked, his foot slipped from the place, and he fell with a jerk, the rope sliding painfully through his chafed hands. At that very instant it seemed to him that the rope itself was falling. From above there came a dull creaking sound, and from below a cry of horror burst from Bart. At that instant, Pat’s feet touched the bottom of the pit.
Bart grasped his arm convulsively, and pointed upward.
“The beam! the beam!” he almost screamed. “It’s broke. O, what shall we do!”
Pat looked up; and there, clearly defined against the sky, he saw the beam around which the rope was fastened, no longer lying straight across the mouth of the pit, but sagging down in the middle at a sharp angle. It had been rotten in the middle. It had cracked at that last jerk occasioned by his fall from his foothold; and it now hung broken midway, still clinging together by a few fibres, but suspended there above them, like the sword of Damocles, as if by a single hair, and threatening every instant to fall and crush them.
The rope and the beam had both been rotten, and the jerk which had been given when Pat lost his foothold had cracked the one and broken the other. There, about thirty feet above them, hung the end of the rope where it had parted. The rest of it was still in Pat’s hands.