He compressed his lips, and marched on resolutely.
With a warning gesture Barnabas halted; and the men behind him, half hidden in the laurel scrub, shifted their muskets noiselessly, and peered past their leader with strained, intent faces.
There was danger in the still air. Tragedy and death brooded over this dense woody spot in the mountainous solitudes of Pennsylvania. The brink of the chasm was three yards away—a chasm that dropped seventy feet, between narrow, hollowed-out walls of rock, to the deep and sluggish waters of the creek. Through the vistas of foliage and timber could be seen the trunk of the fallen pine, with many a bushy offshoot, that spanned the gorge from bank to bank. But there was no sound of enemy's voices on the farther side; no evidence of the camp save a curl of gray smoke drifting upward to the blue sky, now rosy-flushed with the first light of day.
"Looks like they'd finished their breakfast an' gone," Barnabas said, in a low voice; "but then, ag'in, they may be layin' a trap fur us. It ain't safe ter calkerlate when Simon Glass is around."
"We'll do no good tarrying here, man," grumbled McNicol. "Yonder's the tree, and we're ready to follow."
Barnabas thought of poor Lindsay and then of the horses, and suddenly flung prudence to the winds. "Forward!" he whispered, and starting quickly through the scrub he planted his feet on the fallen pine. Nathan followed with a beating heart, and the next man had just stepped out when a musket-barrel was poked from the bushes across the chasm.
"Back, men," roared Barnabas. "Get to cover," and as he turned around and gained the rear bank by an agile spring, a thunderous report woke the echoes of the gorge.
Nathan tried to leap also, but it was too late. He saw the flash and the puff and felt a stinging pain on the right side of his head. All grew dark before him. He tottered, lost his balance, and fell. His hands, clutching at the empty air, caught a projecting limb, and he held to it with desperate strength. As he hung dangling over the gulf, dizzy and stupefied, he heard a harsh voice above cry out: "You fired too soon, you fool. Let the rebels have it now, men. Blaze away at the bushes."
A straggling discharge of musketry followed the words, and then Nathan's fingers slipped. He shot downward forty feet to the bushy top of a tree that grew slantwise from the wall of the gorge. This broke the violence of his fall, but it did not stop him. He bounded from branch to branch, and fell the remaining distance to the creek, plunging head first beneath the surface.
The instinct of life was strong within the lad, and his struggles soon brought him to the surface, choking and gasping. He was too bruised and stunned to swim a fair stroke, but by feeble paddling he managed to keep his head above water.