“Do you think you can do it?” asked Bob, looking upward at the smooth face of the rock.
“Course I can do it; any fellow could. Hello!” He stumbled over the rocks and picked up a paint-brush, very sticky with vermilion paint. “Just the thing,” he chuckled. “We won’t have to buy one. Kind of them to leave it, eh? And here’s the can over here. Think we’ll want that?”
“I don’t believe so, but you might fetch it out in case we do.”
Dan did so, and carried can and brush down through the bushes to the edge of the meadow and there hid them. Then, with many a backward look at the cliff, they made their way to the road, and so to the village, arranging ways and means as they went.
“We’ll go along the road by the river and strike up the mountain from there, keeping along this side. I’ll make a seat out of a piece of board, like a swing, you know, and hitch that to the end of the rope. Then all you fellows will have to do is to lower me down.”
“That’s all right; but how will you move along from left to right when you’re down there?”
Dan considered this problem for a minute in silence; then he was forced to own himself stuck.
“Of course, you can pull me up and move the rope, and then let me down again, but that will take a month of Sundays.”
Nevertheless, no better solution of the problem presented itself, and Dan reckoned that he could paint three letters from each position, necessitating but five changes.