s to encourage Elsie and make her feel
the necessity for instant action. 'He is alive still,' I exclaimed,
looking up; 'the birds are crying! If he were dead, they would return to
their nest-- Elsie, we _must_ get to him!'

She rose, bewildered, and followed me. I held her hand tight, and coaxed
her to scramble over the rocks where the scratches showed the way, or to
clamber at times over fallen trunks of huge fir-trees. Yet it was hard
work climbing; even Harold's sure feet had slipped often on the wet and
slimy boulders, though, like most of Queen Margherita's set, he was an
expert mountaineer. Then, at times, I lost the faint track, so that I
had to diverge and look close to find it. These delays fretted me. 'See,
a stone loosed from its bed--he must have passed by here.... That twig
is newly snapped; no doubt he caught at it.... Ha, the moss there has
been crushed; a foot has gone by. And the ants on that ant-hill, with
their eggs in their mouths--a man's tread has frightened them.' So, by
some instinctive sense, as if the spirit of my savage ancestors revived
within me, I managed to recover the spoor again and again by a miracle,
till at last, round a corner by a defiant cliff--with a terrible
foreboding, my heart stood still within me.

We had come to an end. A great projecting buttress of crag rose sheer in
front. Above lay loose boulders. Below was a shrub-hung precipice. The
birds we had seen from home were still circling and screaming.

They were a pair of peregrine hawks. Their nest seemed to lie far below
the broken scar, some sixty or seventy feet beneath us.

'He is not dead!' I cried once more, with my heart in my mouth. 'If he
were, they would have returned. He has fallen, and is lying, alive,
below there!'

[Illustration: I ADVANCED ON MY HANDS AND KNEES TO THE EDGE OF THE
PRECIPICE.]

Elsie shrank back against the wall of rock. I advanced on my hands and
knees to the edge of the precipice. It was not quite sheer, but it
dropped like a sea-cliff, with broken ledges.

I could see where Harold had slipped. He had tried to climb round the
crag that blocked the road, and the ground at the edge of the precipice
had given way with him; it showed a recent founder of a few inches. Then
he clutched at a branch of broom as he fell; but it slipped through his
fingers, cutting them; for there was blood on the wiry stem. I knelt by
the side of the cliff and craned my head over. I scarcely dared to look.
In s