Rob. "We'll tie the end of the
rope around this big rock here; and I'll pass the other end through my
belt and pay it out as I climb down. I won't need to put all my weight
on the rope, but will just use it to steady me as I climb. If I have any
trouble getting up, why, then you three fellows can see what you can do
toward pulling. Don't you let it slip, now. And if I shake the rope
three times, then you begin to pull. You can signal me the same way if I
get where you can't see me, or where you can't hear me call for the
noise the birds are making."

It was really a dangerous thing which Rob proposed to do, but boys do
not always stop to figure about danger when there is something
interesting ahead. Passing the rope through his belt as he had said, he
kept hold of the free end with one hand, and so, picking his way from
one projecting point to another, he began slowly to pass down the
seaward face of the rock, which proved to be not so steep as it had
seemed from below, although ridged here and there with sharp walls or
cut banks, which crossed from almost one face of the pinnacle to the
other.

Rob's daring was rewarded by the finding of countless numbers of nests
of the sea-parrots, which were bored back straight into the face of the
cleft. "Here they are, boys!" he called back, his voice being even by
this time barely distinguishable amid the clamor of the gulls and other
wild birds which continuously circled about.

Rob thrust his arm into one of these holes in the cleft, and was lucky
enough to catch a female parrot by the neck and to pull her out without
any injury to himself. For a time he examined the bird, laughing at its
awkward movements when he flung it on the rocks at last, uninjured.
Then he edged on along the rock face, his foot on a sort of narrow
shelf and his body guided by the supporting rope. "I can get a lot of
them here!" he called up to his friends.

A moment later he pushed his arm again into an aperture among these
nests. At once he uttered a sudden, sharp cry and pulled out his arm.
His finger had been bitten almost to the bone by the hornlike beak of
one of the birds. The pain of this alone would have been bad enough, but
now it caused a still more serious accident.

As Rob shook his bleeding finger at his side, and half raised his left
arm to fend off the rush of two or three angry wild birds, he suddenly
slipped with one foot at the edge of the narrow shelf on which he stood,
and befo