wning edge
of the chasm and disappeared.

Several square yards of the snow-drift had broken away. At their very feet
fell the unexpected precipice. The boys and girls shrank back from the
peril with terrified cries, clinging to each other.

"She is killed!" moaned Helen, and covered her face with her mittened
hands.

"Ruth! Ruth!" called Tom, charging back toward the broken snow-drift.

But Bobbins caught and held him. "Don't make a fool of yourself, old man!"
commanded the big fellow. "You can't help her by falling over the cliff
yourself."

"Oh! how deep can that place be?" gasped Ralph Tingley.

"What will mother say?" cried his brother.

"Ruth! Ruth!" shouted Ann Hicks, and dropped on her knees to crawl to the
edge.

"You'll be down there yourself, Ann!" exclaimed Helen, sobbing.

"A couple of you useless boys grab me by the ankles," commanded the
western girl. "Come! take a good hold. Now let me see----"

She hung half over the verge of the rock. The fall was sheer for fifty
feet at least. It was a narrow cut in the hill, with apparently unscalable
sides and open only toward the lake.

"I--I don't see a thing," panted the girl.

"Shout again," urged Helen.

"Let's all shout together!" cried Isadore. "Now!"

They raised their voices in a long, lingering yell. Again and again they
repeated it. They thought nothing now of the possibility of attracting the
constable and his companions to the scene.

Meanwhile nothing but the echoes replied to their hail. Down there in the
chasm Ann Hicks saw no sign of the lost girl. The bottom of the place
seemed heaped high with snow.

"She plunged right into the drift, and perhaps she's smothered down
there," gasped Ann. "Oh! what shall we do?"

"If it's a deep drift Ruth may not be hurt at all," cried Tom. "Do let me
look, Ann. That's a good girl."

The western girl was drawn back and the boy took her place. Bobbins and
Ralph Tingley let Tom slide farther over the verge of the precipice than
they had Ann.

"She went down feet first," panted Tom. "There isn't an obstruction she
could have hit. She must have dropped right into the snowbank in the
bottom--Ruth! Ruth Fielding!"

But even his sharp eyes could discover no mark in the snow. Nothing of the
lost girl appeared above the drift at the foot of this sheer cliff. She
might have been smothered under the snow, as Ann suggested. And yet, that
scarcely seemed probable.

Surely the fall into the soft drift