ock, coiled down a slope littered with debris to
another field of loose stones, and in a quarter of a mile brought up
at the brink of a cliff. Sunnysides, then, had crossed the summit, and
was descending to whatever lay below.

In ten minutes Haig himself was at the margin of the chasm; for little
wider than a chasm was that deep and narrow gulch, far up the side of
Thunder Mountain, into which he now looked in wonderment and
perplexity. A thousand feet or more below him lay a tiny patch of
meadow of a brilliant green, with a thread of water sparkling through
it, and on all sides, excepting that nearest him, black forests
encompassed it, and mounted dense to the timber line save where, at
his right, the stream ran down through its gorge. There, evidently,
would go the trail also, dropping into the Black Lake country, of evil
reputation.

But where now was the trail? He dismounted, and leaned over the edge
of the precipice; and there he discovered that he had missed the
exact point of departure by some fifteen yards, and that at this
distance to his left there was a break in the sharp brink, where the
trail fell off precipitately to a heap of broken stone and sand. The
cliff had been shattered in some convulsion of nature, or loosened and
disintegrated by the elements, and enormous masses of it had fallen
into the gulch. These masses appeared to be in a state of instability,
and it was not clear to Haig, from where he lay, how a trail could
ever have been picked out among those jutting rocks and slides of
debris, or how, once found, it could have remained intact on that
shifting foundation. Was it possible that any living thing had ever
made its way down (much less _up_) that steep and treacherous rubble
heap?

He was studying it incredulously, when Sunnysides suddenly resolved
all doubts. From behind a projecting rock the horse came out on one of
the many rough ledges that had been formed by lateral cleavage of the
cliff in its fall. Hesitating a moment there, he plunged down a short
declivity, and landed sprawling on another shelf perhaps twenty feet
lower down, and somewhat to the right of the first, where he once more
vanished from Haig's sight.

"All right!" cried Haig. "If you can do that we can. Eh, Trixy?"

He mounted quickly, urged the reluctant mare to the break in the edge
of the cliff, and forced her over. For some thirty feet the trail went
down the face of the precipice, much like a fire escape on the