Apparently there was no possible way by which we might hope to cross the
canyon, and I threw myself prone upon the top of the stony brink of the
chasm and peered down the awful abyss at the silver thread, shining in
the gloom of the shadows, which marked the course of a stream, and
wondered what the Boy Scouts of Troop 6 of Marlborough would do under
the circumstances.
I studied the face of the opposite cliff in a vain search for some hint
to the solution of the problem before us, looking up and down from side
to side as far as allowed by the range of my vision. At length my
attention wandered to the perpendicular face of the cliff, on the top of
which my body was sprawled; there was an upright crack in the face of
the stone wall, and as I examined the fracture I saw that a piece of
wood had lodged in the crack; a piece of wood in a crevice in a rock is
not so unusual an occurrence as to excite remark; but when it occurred
to me that we were then far above the timber line, my interest and
curiosity were at once aroused.
The end of the stick was within a short distance from my hand, and
reaching down I grasped the wood and brought forth, not a short club or
stick, as I thought to be concealed there, but a very long pole. The
result of my investigations was so unexpected that I came dangerously
near allowing the thing to slide through my fingers and fall to the
bottom of the canyon. It was a neatly-smoothed, slender piece of
lodge-pole pine which was brought to view, and it had a crooked root
nicely spliced to one end and bound tightly in place with rawhide
thongs. Big Pete was wholly absorbed in the trail, the study of which he
had resumed, and when I looked up he was down on all fours, minutely
studying the ground. Presently he cried, "Le-loo, tha' pesky lad ha'
been over wha' you be after sompen and he took it back tha' again afore
he made his jump! If you're any good you'll find what the lad was
after."
"He was after his barleycorn broomstick," I replied, proudly, "and here
it is, although I must confess it is a pretty long one for a fellow of
his size, and it looks more like a giant Bo-Peep's crook than a witch's
broom."
Big Pete eagerly snatched the pole from my hands and examined it
carefully. At length he said, "This hyer is the end used for the handle;
one can see by the finger marks, an' this crook is used to scrape stone
with, one kin see, with half an eye, by the way the end is sandpapered
off. Over tha' air some marks on the stone which look almighty like as
if they'd been made by the end of this yer hook slipping down the face
of the rock.
"Now, I wonder wha' cud be up tha' on the top of the rock that the boy
wanted," mused Big Pete, and for a moment or so he stood in silent
thought; at length he exclaimed, "Why, bless my corn-shucking soul, if I
don't believe he's got a lariat staked out tha' an' crosses this ditch
same as we-uns aimed to do!" With that he began raking and scraping the
top of the opposite rock with the shepherd's crook, and presently there
came tumbling and twisting like a snake down the face of the cliff, a
long braided rawhide rope with a loop at the bottom end.
"Waugh, Le-loo! tha's no witchcraft 'bout this 'cep the magic of
common-sense; but we hain't through with him yit!" By this time Pete had
the end of the rawhide rope in his hands and was testing the strength of
its anchorage upon the opposite cliff. The point where it was fastened
projected some distance over the ledge, where the supposed landing-place
was located, thus making it possible for one to swing at the end of the
rope from our side without danger of coming into too violent contact
with the opposite cliff.
As soon as my big friend was satisfied that the rope was safe he
grasped it with his two hands, and with one foot in the loop and the
other free to use as a fender, he sailed across the abyss and landed
safely upon the crumbling ledge opposite.
Holding fast to the rawhide rope with his hands and bracing his feet
against the rock, Pete could walk up the face of the cliff by going
hand-over-hand up the cable at the same time. He had almost reached the
top when I was horror-stricken to see a small hand and brown arm reach
over the precipice; but it was neither the grace nor the beauty of this
shapely bit of anatomy which sent the blood surging to my heart, but the
fact that the cold gray glint of a long-bladed knife caught my eyes and
fascinated me with the fabled "charm" of a serpent. The power of speech
forsook me, but with great effort I succeeded in giving utterance to the
inarticulate noise people gurgle when confronted in their sleep by a
shapeless horror. Big Pete heard the noise, but he was not unnerved
when he saw the knife, neither did he show any nightmare symptoms,
although he was dangling over the terrible abyss with a full knowledge
that it needed but a touch of the keen blade of that knife to sever the
straining lariat and dash him, a mangled mass, on the rocks below. The
danger was too real to give Pete the nightmare; there was nothing spooky
to him in the glittering knife blade, and only ghosts and the
supernatural could give Big Pete the nightmare. Calmly he looked at the
hand grasping the power of death with its strong tapering fingers.
Suddenly and in a firm, commanding voice he gave the order, "Drap tha'
knife!"
Ever since I had been in the company of this masterful forest companion
I had obeyed his commands as a matter of course, and so was not
surprised to see the fingers instantly relax their grasp and the knife
go gyrating to the mysterious depths. In a few moments Big Pete was up
and over the edge of the rock and hidden from my view.
Seizing the long-handled shepherd's crook, I caught the dangling end of
the lariat, and was soon scrambling up the face of the cliff, leaving a
trail which the veriest novice would not fail to notice and sending
showers of the crumbling stones down the path taken by the knife; it was
several minutes before I had clambered over the face of the projecting
crag and was safe across the black chasm which lay athwart our trail.
If the Wild Hunter was indeed my father, he certainly was a woodcrafter
and scout to bring pride to a fellow's heart, for I doubted not that the
Indian boy was his retainer because the porcupine quill decorations on
his buckskin shirt had the same peculiar pattern as that on the wamus of
the Wild Hunter himself as well as on the collar of the pet sheep I had
killed, and also on the buckskin bag of gold.