|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
 |
||||
|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
|
|
||||
|
“Come ahead,” said Phineas, as they reached the rocks, and saw, in the min- gled starlight and dawn, the traces of a rude but plainly marked footpath leading up among them; “this is one of our old hunting-dens. Come up!” Phineas went before, springing up the rocks like a goat, with the boy in his arms. Jim came second, bearing his trembling old mother over his shoulder, and George and Eliza brought up the rear. The party of horsemen came up to the fence, and, with mingled shouts and oaths, were dismounting, to prepare to fol- low them. A few moments’ scrambling brought them to the top of the ledge; the path then passed between a narrow defile, where only one could walk at a time, till suddenly they came to a rift or chasm more than a yard in breadth, and beyond which lay a pile of rocks, separate from the rest of the ledge, standing full thirty feet high, with its sides steep and perpendicular as those of a castle. Phineas eas- ily leaped the chasm, and set down the boy on a smooth, flat platform of crisp white moss, that covered the top of the rock. “Over with you!” he called; “spring, now, once, for your lives!” said he, as one after another sprang across. Several fragments of loose stone formed a kind of breastwork, which sheltered their position from the observation of those below. “Well, here we all are,” said Phineas, peeping over the stone breastwork to watch the assailants, who were coming tumultuously up under the rocks. “Let ‘em get us, if they can. Whoever comes here has to walk single file between those two rocks, in fair range of your pistols, boys, d’ye see?” |
