nding the muddy water with their paddles, they slowly glided into the
angle between the bowlder and the precipice, and jammed the fragment of
the towline in a crevice. For the first time in six hours, and in a run of
thirty miles, they were at rest. Wiping the sweat of labor and anxiety
from their brows, they looked about them, at first in silence, querying
what next?

"I wish I was on an iceberg," said Glover in his despair.

"An' I wish I was in Oirland," added Sweeny. "But if the divil himself was
to want to desart here, he couldn't."

Thurstane believed that he had seen Clara for the last time, even should
she escape her own perils. Through his field-glass he surveyed the whole
gloomy scene with microscopic attention, searching for an exit out of this
monstrous man-trap, and searching in vain. It was as impossible to descend
the rapid as it was to scale the walls of the canon. He had just heard
Sweeny say, "I wish I was bein' murthered by thim naygurs," and had smiled
at the utterance of desperation with a grim sympathy, when a faint hope
dawned upon him.

Not more than a yard above the water was a ledge or shelf in the face of
the precipice. The layer of sandstone immediately over this shelf was
evidently softer than the general mass; and in other days (centuries ago),
when it had formed one level with the bed of the river, it had been deeply
eroded. This erosion had been carried along the canon on an even line of
altitude as far as the softer layer extended. Thurstane could trace it
with his glass for what seemed to him a mile, and there was of course a
possibility that it reached below the foot of the rapid. The groove was
everywhere about twenty feet high, while its breadth varied from a yard or
so to nearly a rod.

Here, then, was a road by which they might perhaps turn the obstacle. The
only difficulty was that while the bed of the river descended rapidly, the
shelf kept on at the same elevation, so that eventually the travellers
would come to a jumping-off place. How high would it be? Could they get
down it so as to regain the stream and resume their navigation? Well, they
must try it; there was no other road. With one eloquent wave of his hand
Thurstane pointed out this slender chance of escape to his comrades.

"Hurray!" shouted Glover, after a long stare, in which the emotions
succeeded each other like colors in a dolphin.

"Can we make the jump at the other end?" asked the lieutenant.

"Reckon so,