Sounding the muddy water with their paddles, they slowly glided into the angle between the bowlder and the precipice, and jammed the fragment of the towline in a crevice.  For the first time in six hours, and in a run of thirty miles, they were at rest.  Wiping the sweat of labor and anxiety from their brows, they looked about them, at first in silence, querying what next?

“I wish I was on an iceberg,” said Glover in his despair.

“An’ I wish I was in Oirland,” added Sweeny.  “But if the divil himself was to want to desart here, he couldn’t.”

Thurstane believed that he had seen Clara for the last time, even should she escape her own perils.  Through his field-glass he surveyed the whole gloomy scene with microscopic attention, searching for an exit out of this monstrous man-trap, and searching in vain.  It was as impossible to descend the rapid as it was to scale the walls of the canon.  He had just heard Sweeny say, “I wish I was bein’ murthered by thim naygurs,” and had smiled at the utterance of desperation with a grim sympathy, when a faint hope dawned upon him.

Not more than a yard above the water was a ledge or shelf in the face of the precipice.  The layer of sandstone immediately over this shelf was evidently softer than the general mass; and in other days (centuries ago), when it had formed one level with the bed of the river, it had been deeply eroded.  This erosion had been carried along the canon on an even line of altitude as far as the softer layer extended.  Thurstane could trace it with his glass for what seemed to him a mile, and there was of course a possibility that it reached below the foot of the rapid.  The groove was everywhere about twenty feet high, while its breadth varied from a yard or so to nearly a rod.

Here, then, was a road by which they might perhaps turn the obstacle.  The only difficulty was that while the bed of the river descended rapidly, the shelf kept on at the same elevation, so that eventually the travellers would come to a jumping-off place.  How high would it be?  Could they get down it so as to regain the stream and resume their navigation?  Well, they must try it; there was no other road.  With one eloquent wave of his hand Thurstane pointed out this slender chance of escape to his comrades.

“Hurray!” shouted Glover, after a long stare, in which the emotions succeeded each other like colors in a dolphin.

“Can we make the jump at the other end?” asked the lieutenant.

“Reckon so,” chirruped Glover.  “Look a here.”

He exhibited a pile of unpleasant-looking matter which proved to be a mass of strips of fresh hide.

“Hoss skin,” he explained.  “Peeled off a mustang.  Borrowed it from that Texan cuss.  Thought likely we might want to splice our towline.  ’Bout ten fathom, I reckon; ‘n’ there’s the lariat, two fathom more.  All we’ve got to de is to pack up, stick our backs under, ‘n’ travel.”