"Oh, no; I'm not. Go ahead and rout your ghosts out. Stir 'em up, and make 'em jump through the hoops and back again. Fine!" exploded Tubby.
"Whatever is the matter with him?" asked Merritt, looking about for an answer.
"That idea he had a while back has gone to his head," laughed Harry.
And such was the general opinion.
As has been said, the cliff, at the summit of which were the cave dwellings, lay about half a mile back from the huts of the Far Pasture cow-punchers. The cliff was in itself a remarkable formation. It towered sheer up and down like the wall of a house. It was just as if a giant cheese-knife had shaved a neat slab off the face of the mountain—a slab some four hundred or more feet in height, and a mile or more wide at the base.
From where the boys were, however, they could perceive an old cattle trail winding up the mountainside, off beyond one edge of the smooth cliff. It traced its way among the scrub growth and stunted trees almost—so far as they could judge—to a point near the summit, and afforded an easy way of reaching the top of the cliff.
An hour or more of tough climbing brought them to the top of the mountain—or high hill—which formed a sort of plateau. No time was lost in making for the edge of the cliff, in the face of which, some twenty feet or more from the top, were bored the entrances to the cave-dwellers' mysterious homes.
"Well," said Tubby triumphantly, as he gazed over the dizzy precipice "no cave man's home for us."
It looked as if the stout youth was right. A narrow ledge, forming a sort of pathway against the naked side of the cliff, ran below the cave dwellings as a shelf is seen to extend sometimes below a row of pigeon holes. But from the summit of the cliff to the ledge was, as has been said, all of twenty feet, and there seemed to be no way of bridging the distance.
"Those cave men must have been way ahead of the times," mused Tubby.