Charley then joined him in shouting, but no answer came, and Charley felt as a person does in a dreadful dream, every instant growing weaker and weaker.
“Tom, I don’t think that I can hold on many seconds longer,” he at last said; “good-bye—I must let go—the earth is crumbling away—I am going—oh?”
At that instant Tom, feeling that Charley’s safety depended on his being able to get on the ground above, made a desperate effort—his hook became loosened, in vain he tried to dig his fingers into the earth, and at the same moment that Charley gave his last despairing cry and lost his hold he lost his; down he came, but not as he expected, on the hard rock a hundred feet below him, but into a shallow pool not five feet from where he had been so long hanging.
“Why, where am I?” exclaimed Charley, who, at the same time, had lodged safely on a green mound close to the pool, and tearing off the handkerchief from his eyes he looked about him; “after all, those smugglers are not so bad as we thought them.”
“We are at the bottom of a chalk-pit, Mr Charles,” answered Tom, “the fellows have played us a somewhat scurvy trick, but I cannot but say that it was better than sending us over the cliff and breaking our necks; howsomdever, the sooner we get out of it the better as I’m wet to the skin, and would like to take a brisk walk homeward to get dry.”
A bright moon was shining, though obscured occasionally by the fast driving clouds which came up from the south-west, and by its light they had no difficulty in clambering out of the pit. They were on the top of some downs, at some distance from the edge of the cliff. However, they could see the now foam-covered sea, and distinguish vessels far off running up the Channel before the gale, and thus could take a tolerably direct road homeward, though neither of them had before been thus far from the Tower. They hurried on, being certain that the smugglers could not leave the coast, and hoping that even if one could be captured he would give information where Margery was to be found.
“Margery! poor dear little Margery, she to be all this time in the power of these ruffians!” Charley kept saying to himself as he and Tom hurried on.