“Those zigzag paths are not very safe in good weather, especially the one on the Timberdale side,” she went on. “With the snow on them, perhaps ice, they are positively dangerous. One false step at the top—and the fall might kill him.”
Put in this way, it seemed feasible enough. But yet—somehow I did not take to it.
“Robert Ashton is strong and agile, Jane. He has come down the zigzag hundreds of times.”
“I seem to see him lying there, at the bottom of the Ravine,” she said, staring as before into the fire. “I—wish—some of you would go and look for him.”
“Perhaps we had better. I’ll make one. Who’s this?”
It was Tom Coney. His mother had sent him to see after me. I thought I’d tell him—keeping counsel about the dream—that Robert Ashton might have come to grief in the Ravine.
“What kind of grief?” asked Tom.
“Turned a summersault down the zigzag, and be lying with a leg broken.”
Tom’s laugh displayed his small white teeth: the notion amused him excessively. “What else would you like to suppose, Johnny?”