f a year in the wilderness, and was in his sixteenth year,
besides being unusually tall and robust for his age. Indeed he looked
more like a full-grown man than a stripling; for hard, incessant toil,
had developed his muscles and enlarged his frame, and his stirring life,
combined latterly with anxiety, had stamped a few of the lines of
manhood on his sunburnt countenance. But, although he could have easily
overcome the Indian, he knew that he would be instantly missed; and,
from what he had seen of the powers of the savages in tracking wild
animals to their dens in the mountains, he felt that he could not
possibly elude them except by stratagem.

Perplexed and wearied with unavailing thought and anxiety, Martin
pressed his hands to his forehead and gazed down the perpendicular
cliff, which was elevated fully a hundred feet above the plain below.
Suddenly he started and clasped his hands upon his eyes, as if to shut
out some terrible object from his sight. Then, creeping cautiously
towards the edge of the cliff, he gazed down, while an expression of
stern resolution settled upon his pale face.

And well might Martin's cheek blanch, for he had hit upon a plan of
escape which, to be successful, required that he should twice turn a
bold, unflinching face on death. The precipice, as before mentioned,
was fully a hundred feet high, and quite perpendicular. At the foot of
it there flowed a deep and pretty wide stream, which, just under the
spot where Martin stood, collected in a deep black pool, where it rested
for a moment ere it rushed on its rapid course down the valley. Over
the cliff and into that pool Martin made up his mind to plunge, and so
give the impression that he had fallen over and been drowned. The risk
he ran in taking such a tremendous leap was very great indeed, but that
was only half the danger he must encounter.

The river was one of a remarkable kind, of which there are one or two
instances in South America. It flowed down the valley between high
rocks, and, a few hundred yards below the pool, it ran straight against
the face of a precipice and there terminated to all appearance; but a
gurgling vortex in the deep water at the base of the cliff, and the
disappearance of everything that entered it, showed that the stream
found a subterranean passage. There was no sign of its re-appearance,
however, in all the country round. In short the river was lost in the
bowels of the earth.

From the pool