had no way of knowing how badly he was hurt. Adriana
fairly flew from one to another, beseeching us to save him.

"He's dying! He's under the rocks!" she screamed. "Oh, why don't you get
him out?"

With grave faces Willis, Ben, Addison and Thomas peered round the fallen
rock and cast about for some means of moving it.

"We must pry it away!" Thomas exclaimed. "Let's get a big pry!"

"We can't move that rock!" Ben declared. "We shall have to drill it and
blast it."

But we had used all the powder and fuse, and it would take several hours
to get more. Ben insisted, however, on sending Alfred Batchelder for the
powder, and then, seizing the hammer and drill, he began to drill a hole
in the side of the rock.

Thomas, however, still believed that we could move the rock by throwing
our united weight on a long pry; and many of the boys agreed with him.
We felled a spruce tree seven inches in diameter, trimmed it and cut a
pry twenty feet long from it. Carrying it to the rock, we set a stone
for a fulcrum, and then threw our weight repeatedly on the long end. The
rock, which must have weighed ten tons or more, scarcely stirred. Ben
laughed at us scornfully and went on drilling.

All the while Adriana stood weeping, and the other girls were shedding
tears in sympathy. Rufus's distressed cries came to our ears, entreating
us to help him and saying something that we could not understand about
his leg.

As Addison stood racking his brain for some quicker way of moving the
rock he remembered a contrivance, called a "giant purchase," that he had
heard of lumbermen's using to break jams of logs on the Androscoggin
River. He had never seen one and had only the vaguest idea how it
worked. All he knew was that it consisted of an immense lever, forty
feet long, laid on a log support and hauled laterally to and fro by
horses. He knew that you could thus get a titanic application of power,
for if the long arm of the lever were forty feet long and the short arm
four feet, the strength of three horses pulling on the long arm would be
increased tenfold--that is, the power of thirty horses would be applied
against the object to be moved.

Addison explained his plan to the rest of us. He sent Thomas and me to
lead several of our horses up through the woods to the pond. We ran all
the way; and we took the whippletrees off the double wagons, and brought
all the spare rope halters. Within an hour we were back there with four
of the stron