Tubby, with his load of duffle, was slightly in advance of the other lads, and humming a song as he trudged along. With the curiosity natural to the stout youth, he could not refrain from wandering from the path to peer over into the depths of the gulch.
“My goodness!” he exclaimed to himself, as he gazed interestedly, “it would be no joke to fall in there.”
As he spoke he drew closer to the edge of the rift and craned his short neck to obtain a still better view of the abyss below him. At this juncture the others, laboring along the trail, caught up with him, and Rob gave the stout Scout a hail.
“Better come away from there, Tubby,” he warned, “you know what happened out west, when you went rubbering about the haunted caves.”
“It’s all right,” retorted the fat boy, “it looks nice and cool down in there. I’d like to——”
The rest of his speech was lost in an alarmed exclamation from the onlookers.
As Tubby uttered his confident remark he seemed to vanish suddenly, like an actor in a stage spectacle who has dived through a trap door. Only a cloud of dust and a roar of stones sliding into the ravine told of what had happened to the over-confident youth. Standing too close to the edge he had stepped on an overhanging bit of ground and had been precipitated downward.
“Good gracious!” cried Rob, in real alarm, “he’s gone over!”
With a swift fear that Tubby’s accident might have resulted fatally, Rob was at the edge of the ravine in two jumps. The rest were not far behind him.
Rob experienced a feeling of intense relief, however, as he gazed into the depths. Some time before, a tree had become dislodged and slid into the rift. It lay upon the bottom of the place. Tubby, luckily for himself, had fallen into its branches and was, except for a few scratches, apparently unhurt.