It seemed right good fortune that he had overheard their plans, but how could he circumvent them? He had it. A sudden inspiration burned into his soul. He must descend by the precipitous route on the side toward the sea down which he and Jo had traveled the day before. They had made the descent for pleasure, then, helping each other, and in broad daylight. Could he do the trick alone and in the dark?
He tried to scramble to his feet. The effort sent a paralyzing pain through his head and neck, and he relaxed again with a stifled moan. After a moment he tried again, more slowly now, and in spite of the terrible pain, soon staggered to his feet.
He looked about. Directly above him was an overhanging boulder. It was upon its jagged edge he had struck when falling. Below was the stone turreted, bushy mountain side. Supporting himself with his hands he crept around the base of the boulder and soon got a broader outlook. His gun, as too great a handicap to carry on his trip, he discarded, carefully secreting it.
A considerable interval must have elapsed since he received that paralyzing abrasure from the rock against which he had struck, for the sun was gone and a melancholy gloom was settling over the wild landscape. Assuredly he must be moving. Those unscrupulous cutthroats would stop at nothing. And was not Jim, his dearest and most admired friend, in danger? It was an agonizing thought that gripped his mind.
He sprang forward with a spasmodic intake of the breath, and sped like a wild faun along the rugged hillside. He did not know that his face and head were caked with clotted blood. He even forgot the throbbing pain. He would climb down the cliffs by the difficult and undetermined route he had traversed the day before.
Bursting through thickets and stumbling across darkening ravines he reached the point from which the perilous descent of the cliff side could be undertaken. Gloomy crags towered above him, and below, the almost unknown forbidding way, crowded with tragic uncertainties.
But not a moment could be spared. Without hesitation he plunged recklessly into the abyss and in a moment was hugging the cold rocks, clutching at supporting twigs and undergrowths, sliding, slipping, almost falling down a frightful precipice.
Once he lost his hold entirely and felt himself whirling through the darkness, but he writhed himself upright in his fall and brought up with a smash and a crash in the dense foliage of a quertel nut tree. He did not feel the torn skin on face and hands, nor know that a fresh torrent of blood burst from the abrasure on his head. He groped blindly for the splintered rocks at the trees’ base, felt their resisting force and lunged forward once more.
Soon he found himself on a sloping bench or shelf whose surface was on a level with the tops of some trees below, and he remembered the spot. Here Jo and he had enjoyed a grand view of the ocean, enveloped in mystery and obscurity. Owing to the absence of shrubbery it was lighter here, and out of pure necessity he was compelled to halt for breath. He leaned against the wall of rock for a moment before commencing the next stage of the journey.
He remembered that his former passage had led him for a hundred feet or more before bringing him to another drop. Straining his eyes along the stretch of shelf he suddenly beheld an object emerge from the darkness and grow larger as it approached. Then appeared another and another till he had counted six, all in regular Indian file and moving in absolute silence.