The same old cliff confronted us, although the many uprooted trees showed a jagged outcrop this side the sheer wall. We looked up helplessly at the height. It seemed foolish to think of O'mie being in that inaccessible spot.
"If he is up there," Dave Mead urged, "and we can get to him, it will be to put him alongside Judson's baby this afternoon."
All the other boys were for turning back and hunting about Fingal's Creek again, all except Bud. Such a pink and white boy he was, with a dimple in each cheek and a blowsy tow head.
"Will you stay with me, Bud, till I get up there?" I asked him.
"Yeth thir! or down there. Let'th go round an' try the other thide."
"Well, I guess we'll all stay with Phil, you cottontop," Tell Mapleson put in.
We all began to circle round the bluff to get beyond this steep, forbidding wall. Our plan was to go down the river beyond the cave, and try to climb up from that point. Crossing along by the edge of the bluff we passed the steepest part and were coming again to where the treetops and bushes that clung to the side of the high wall reached above the crest, as they do across the street from my own home. Just ahead of us, as we hurried, I caught sight of a flat slab of the shelving rock slipped aside and barely balancing on the edge, one end of it bending down the treetops as if newly slid into that place. All about the stone the thin sod of the bluff's top was cut and trampled as if a struggle had been there. We examined it carefully. A horse's tracks were plainly to be seen.
"Something happened here," Le Claire said. "Looks like a horse had been urged up to the very edge and had kept pulling back."
"And that stone is just slipped from its place," Clayton Anderson declared. "Something has happened here since the rains."
As we came to the edge, we saw a pile of earth recently scraped from the stone outcrop above.