This was a question that might have been easily answered.  No doubt he was physically capable of coping with the man, for he had now been upwards of a year in the wilderness, and was in his sixteenth year, besides being unusually tall and robust for his age.  Indeed he looked more like a full-grown man than a stripling; for hard, incessant toil had developed his muscles and enlarged his frame, and his stirring life, combined latterly with anxiety, had stamped a few of the lines of manhood on his sunburnt countenance.  But, although he could have easily overcome the Indian, he knew that he would be instantly missed; and, from what he had seen of the powers of the savages in tracking wild animals to their dens in the mountains, he felt that he could not possibly elude them except by stratagem.

Perplexed and wearied with unavailing thought and anxiety, Martin pressed his hands to his forehead and gazed down the perpendicular cliff, which was elevated fully a hundred feet above the plain below.  Suddenly he started and clasped his hands upon his eyes, as if to shut out some terrible object from his sight.  Then, creeping cautiously towards the edge of the cliff, he gazed down, while an expression of stern resolution settled upon his pale face.

And well might Martin’s cheek blanch, for he had hit upon a plan of escape which, to be successful, required that he should twice turn a bold, unflinching face on death.  The precipice, as before mentioned, was fully a hundred feet high, and quite perpendicular.  At the foot of it there flowed a deep and pretty wide stream, which, just under the spot where Martin stood, collected in a deep black pool, where it rested for a moment ere it rushed on its rapid course down the valley.  Over the cliff and into that pool Martin made up his mind to plunge, and so give the impression that he had fallen over and been drowned.  The risk he ran in taking such a tremendous leap was very great indeed, but that was only half the danger he must encounter.

The river was one of a remarkable kind, of which there are one or two instances in South America.  It flowed down the valley between high rocks, and, a few hundred yards below the pool, it ran straight against the face of a precipice and there terminated to all appearance; but a gurgling vortex in the deep water at the base of the cliff, and the disappearance of everything that entered it, showed that the stream found a subterranean passage.  There was no sign of its reappearance, however, in all the country round.  In short, the river was lost in the bowels of the earth.

From the pool to the cliff where the river was engulfed the water ran like a mill-race, and there was no spot on either bank where any one could land, or even grasp with his hand, except one.  It was a narrow, sharp rock, that jutted out about two feet from the bank, quite close to the vortex of the whirlpool.  This rock was Martin’s only hope.  To miss it would be certain destruction.  But if he should gain a footing on it he knew that he could climb by a narrow fissure into a wild, cavernous spot, which it was exceedingly difficult to reach from any other point.  A bend in the river concealed this rock and the vortex from the place whereon he stood, so that he hoped to be able to reach the point of escape before the savage could descend the slope and gain the summit of the cliff from whence it could be seen.