e."

He did not finish his words, for all at once the peculiar cry arose
again, and this time it seemed to come from out of the deep jagged
hollow, and certainly from the other side.

"How strange!" said the lad, with a feeling akin to dread running
through him. "That can't be a bird."

He listened again, waiting for some minutes in the midst of the silence
of the great wilderness in which he crouched.

Then "Ahoy!" came up, so clearly that there was no room for doubt, and
Aleck's heart began to beat fast as thought after thought flashed
through his brain.

"It must be someone calling," he felt and when after a few minutes the
cry arose again, the thought struck him that it must come from somewhere
beneath his feet, from an opening in the wall of the crack and then
strike against the opposite wall, from which it was reflected, so that
it seemed to come from that side, and from some distance away.

Aleck waited till the cry came across again, and then shouted in answer:

"Hallo there! What is it?"

There was no response. Then after a pause came "Ahoy!" once more.

"Where are you?" shouted Aleck, but there was no reply, and the result
was the same when he tried over and over again.

"Whoever it is, he can't hear me," thought the lad, and growing excited
now as he concluded that some fisherman, or perhaps a strange wanderer,
had slipped, fallen, and perhaps broken a limb, he began to set about
finding him and affording help.

Coming to the belief more fully that the sound came from beneath him,
Aleck lay down upon his chest with his head over the brink of the rocky
gash, and, holding on tightly, strained out as far as he could to look
down. But he could see nothing, and rose up again to look to his left
for the dying out in the solid cliff of the top end of the gorge.

That meaning a difficult climb, he made up his mind, to lower himself
down over the edge, and setting his teeth, he began to lower himself
over; but a slip at the outset so upset his nerves that he scrambled
back, panting as if he had been running a mile.

"Nearly went down," he muttered. "That's not the way to help anyone who
has just fallen."

He paused for a few moments to think about getting help from Eilygugg.

"There are no smugglers at home now," he said to himself, and his
thoughts turned homeward.

"Uncle couldn't climb up here and handle ropes," he muttered; "and as
for Ness--bah! he's a stupid muddling old woman.

"I must