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 of wood had lodged in the crack; a piece of wood in a crevice in a rock is not so unusual an occurrence as to excite remark; but when it occurred to me that we were then far above the timber line, my interest and curiosity were at once aroused.

The end of the stick was within a short distance from my hand, and reaching down I grasped the wood and brought forth, not a short club or stick, as I thought to be concealed there, but a very long pole. The result of my investigations was so unexpected that I came dangerously near allowing the thing to slide through my fingers and fall to the bottom of the canyon. It was a neatly-smoothed, slender piece of lodge-pole pine which was brought to view, and it had a crooked root nicely spliced to one end and bound tightly in place with rawhide thongs. Big Pete was wholly absorbed in the trail, the study of which he had resumed, and when I looked up he was down on all fours, minutely studying the ground. Presently he cried, “Le-loo, tha’ pesky lad ha’ been over wha’ you be after sompen and he took it back tha’ again afore he made his jump! If you’re any good you’ll find what the lad was after.”

“He was after his barleycorn broomstick,” I replied, proudly, “and here it is, although I must confess it is a pretty long one for a fellow of his size, and it looks more like a giant Bo-Peep’s crook than a witch’s broom.”

Big Pete eagerly snatched the pole from my hands and examined it carefully. At length he said, “This hyer is the end used for the handle; one can see by the finger marks, an’ this crook is used to scrape stone with, one kin see, with half an eye, by the way the end is sandpapered off. Over tha’ air some marks on the stone which look almighty like as if they’d been made by the end of this yer hook slipping down the face of the rock.

“Now, I wonder wha’ cud be up tha’ on the top of the rock that the boy wanted,” mused Big Pete, and for a moment or so he stood in silent thought; at length he exclaimed, “Why, bless my corn-shucking soul, if I don’t believe he’s got a lariat staked out tha’ an’ crosses this ditch same as we-uns aimed to do!” With that he began raking and scraping the top of the opposite rock with the shepherd’s crook, and presently there came tumbling and twisting like a snake down the face of the cliff, a long braided rawhide rope with a loop at the bottom end.

“Waugh, Le-loo! tha’s no witchcraft ’bout this ’cep the magic of common-sense; but we hain’t through with him yit!” By this time Pete had the end of the rawhide rope in his hands and was testing the strength of its anchorage upon the opposite cliff. The point where it was fastened projected some distance over the ledge, where the supposed landing-place was located, thus making it possible for one to swing at the end of the rope from our side without danger of coming into too violent contact with the opposite cliff.

As soon as my big friend was satisfied that the rope was safe he grasped it with his two hands, and with one foot in the loop and the other free to use as a fender, he sailed across the abyss and landed safely upon the crumbling ledge opposite.

Holding fast to the rawhide rope with his hands and bracing his feet against the rock, Pete could walk up the face of the cliff by going hand-over-hand up the cable at the same time. He had almost reached the top when I was horror-stricken to see a small hand and brown arm reach over the precipice; but it was neither the grace nor the beauty of this shapely bit of anatomy which sent the blood surging to my heart, but the fact that the cold gray glint of a long-bladed knife caught my eyes and fascinated me with the fabled “charm” of a serpent. The power of speech forsook me, but with great effort I succeeded in giving utterance to the inarticulate noise people gurgle when confronted in their sleep by a shapeless horror. Big Pete heard the noise, but he was not unnerved when he saw the knife, neither did he show any nightmare symptoms, although he was dangling over the terrible abyss with a full knowledge that it needed but a touch of the keen blade of that knife to sever the straining lariat and dash him, a mangled mass, on the rocks below. The danger was too real to give Pete the nightmare; there was nothing spooky to him in the glittering knife blade, and only ghosts and the supernatural could give Big Pete the nightmare. Calmly he looked at the hand grasping the power of death with its strong tapering fingers. Suddenly and in a firm, commanding voice he gave the order, “Drap tha’ knife!”

Ever since I had been in the company of this masterful forest companion I had obeyed his commands as a matter of course, and so was not surprised to see the fingers instantly relax their grasp and the knife go gyrating to the mysterious depths. In a few moments Big Pete was up and over the edge of the rock and hidden from my view.Seizing the long-handled shepherd’s crook, I caught the dangling end of the lariat, and was soon scrambling up the face of the cliff, leaving a trail which the veriest novice would not fail to notice and sending showers of the crumbling stones down the path taken by the knife; it was several minutes before I had clambered over the face of the projecting crag and was safe across the black chasm which lay athwart our trail.

If the Wild Hunter was indeed my father, he certainly was a woodcrafter and scout to bring pride to a fellow’s heart, for I doubted not that the Indian boy was his retainer because the porcupine quill decorations on his buckskin shirt had the same peculiar pattern as that on the wamus of the Wild Hunter himself as well as on the collar of the pet sheep I had killed, and also on the buckskin bag of gold.