noting
every bunch of moss, fragment of stone, drift of snow or bit of moist
earth, reading the shorthand notes of Nature with facility which far
excelled the ability of my own stenographer to read her own notes when
the latter are a few hours old. But a short time had elapsed before I
heard a shout, and, hurrying to the place where my big friend was
seated, I inquired, "Any luck?"

"Tha's as you may call it. Here is wha' tha' boy jumped," he replied,
pointing to some marks on the stone which were imperceptible to me, "an'
tha's wha' he landed," he continued, pointing to a slight ledge upon the
face of the opposite cliff at least twenty feet distant. "He's a jumper,
an' no mistake--guess I might as well have my front tooth pulled, fur
I've lost my bet," soliloquized the trailer, as he sat on the edge of
the cliff, with his legs hanging over the frightful chasm.

The ledge indicated by Big Pete as the landing place of the phenomenal
jumper might possibly have offered a foothold for a bighorn or goat, but
I could not believe that any human being could jump twenty feet to a
crumbling trifle of a ledge on the face of a precipice, and not only
retain a foothold there, but run up the face of the rock like a fly on a
window-pane. Yet I could see that something had worn the ledge at the
point indicated and when I stood a little distance away from the trail I
could plainly note a difference in color marking the course of the trail
where it led over the flinty rocks to the jumping place.

"Wull, Le-loo! What's your opinion of the Ecutock now? Do he use wings
or ride a barleycorn broom?" asked Pete, with a triumphant smile.

CHAPTER XIII

Apparently there was no possible way by which we might hope to cross the
canyon, and I threw myself prone upon the top of the stony brink of the
chasm and peered down the awful abyss at the silver thread, shining in
the gloom of the shadows, which marked the course of a stream, and
wondered what the Boy Scouts of Troop 6 of Marlborough would do under
the circumstances.

I studied the face of the opposite cliff in a vain search for some hint
to the solution of the problem before us, looking up and down from side
to side as far as allowed by the range of my vision. At length my
attention wandered to the perpendicular face of the cliff, on the top of
which my body was sprawled; there was an upright crack in the face of
the stone wall, and as I examined the fracture I saw that a piece o