But anyway, this is what we decided to do. Grove said he’d go up with a torch and keep a fire burning near the machine, while the rest of us hunted around below. He went along under the cliff to where it wasn’t so high and steep, and pretty soon we could see his torch bobbing along the road high up. Then pretty soon we could see a pretty good blaze up there and something black near it.
But down below we just couldn’t find those rocks. We each went separately (except Skinny who stayed by Harry) but the more we hunted the more mixed up we got. Oh, boy, but that was some jungle! From up on the cliff those two rocks had been good and plain, but now that we were down below, all the rocks looked alike. That’s the way it is with rocks; they look different in a bird’s-eye view.
After a while, Pee-wee shouted, “I’ve got a trail! I’ve got a trail! Come here, quick!”
Harry and I were pretty far apart, but we both heard him and followed the light of his torch until we got to the place where he was standing. Sure enough, there was a trail winding all in and out among the rocks.
“It’s a sure enough trail all right,” Harry said; “Pee-wee, you’re a winner. I dare say this starts away up there along the road; it will show us the easiest way back, if it doesn’t show us anything else.”
“Will it show us that man that’s dead?” little Skinny piped up.
Harry said, “I dare say, Alf; we’ll soon see. If he wasn’t thrown off the cliff he probably came by the trail.”
“When I saw those rocks from above,” I put in, “they looked too far out from the cliff for anybody to be thrown there, or to fall there.”
Harry said, “Well, I dare say you’re right. As long as we thought it was our young hero that was wedged in there, and as long as we knew that the only way he could have got there was by falling, it didn’t occur to me that it was pretty far out from the cliff.”
“Then there’s a mystery!” Pee-wee shouted.