falls and clumps of
dripping lace-like fern.

Everything was so beautiful in the sunshine that Chris found himself
wondering how it could have been so dismal in the gloom.

He turned to look across to where his friends were hidden, but they were
concealed too well; nothing was visible but the great blocks of stone
waiting to be levered to the edge of the shelf and sent thundering down;
so turning his eyes from there, the lad gazed along the gulch again in
the direction of the side gully and the open land beyond, where in all
probability Griggs was now wandering in his fictitious search for game.

Two hours of patient waiting since sunrise, which had given place to
painful excitement. Doubt was busy, too, in every brain, for it began
to seem as if something had gone wrong, and the intense desire was
attacking Chris to get down from his hiding-place and go in search of
his friend.

But the orders were to lie still in hiding until the doctor gave the
signal with his whistle, and knowing full well that the slightest
suggestion of an ambush meant ruin to the plan, Chris forced himself to
lie motionless, gazing with aching eyeballs along the gulch for the
sight of the figure that as the time went on seemed as if it would never
appear.

Another hour, the most hopeless of all, the most wearisome and full of
pain, for with the sun getting higher the rays were reflected from the
rock-face till the place grew unbearably hot, with the consequence that
thirst began to parch the watcher's throat. He was growing faint, too,
for want of food, and though he had an ample supply in his wallet he did
not dare to begin eating for fear that something might happen, some
sudden call be made upon his energies.

"If I could only get up and move about," thought Chris.

But he glanced round, and no one else was stirring, while his father
crouched there so severe and stern of aspect that for the moment Chris
forgot his own troubles and thought of those of others.

"Father's feeling it all horribly," thought the boy. "But poor old
Griggs! We ought never to have let him go."

What was that?

Chris strained his ears and gazed upward wildly, for high in front,
nearly four hundred feet above the bottom of the gully, there was the
sound of galloping horses.

The boy shook himself and stared, asking himself if he were mad or
dreaming. For the rocks up there were more than perpendicular, they
leaned right over, and it was absurd to thin