All the party looked white and drawn except Snap; it was a desperate risk, and all knew it, and old Dick would gladly have persuaded the boy to rest content with their present quarters. But it was too late now. As the old foreman knelt with his face inwards, gripping the rock, ready at any moment to take the strain which Snap's fall would put upon the rope, the latter was digging his fingers deeply into the solitary crack. He had taken off his moccasins, and was barefooted and in his shirt-sleeves. Even his cap was off. He wanted no encumbrances, however slight, just now. Two or three times he tried his grip, and then, clinging with his bare feet to the smooth rock, he let himself go and hung spread-eagled against the granite wall. [Illustration: ON THE FACE OF THE CLIFF] As he hung dangling by the first joints of his fingers over the horrid abyss a cold wind came and struck him. It blew his damp hair back from his face, it seemed to chill his straining fingers, and to threaten to tear him from his precarious hold. But not for one half-second did he hesitate. He had considered the peril and braced himself to meet it. Slowly, a foot at a time, he worked his way along. The first foot or two was the difficult part of his journey, for there, as he shifted his hold, his body hung literally upon four fingers and no more. But he comforted himself with the thought of the stout lariat round his waist and the strong arms which held it in the niche he had left. After the first few feet he was able to get more of his hands into the rock, and, though his eye had not noticed them, his bare feet found little inequalities and rough spots to which they clung like the feet of a fly to the ceiling. As he drew near the corner his excitement grew, hope and fear alternating in his breast. At last he could look round it, and he saw that the proverb was again justified, 'Where there's a will there's a way.' 'A precious bad way,' thought Snap, 'but still better than this,' and, so thinking, he crept round the corner, and after what had seemed an age to him again got his foot on a firm hold. For here round the corner was a broad ledge, as if made by the falling away from the cone of some great chip of granite when that convulsion had taken place which had rent the cone from its very summit to where he stood. Now too he saw clearly that, though solid on the other side, a great crack ran down the peak on this side, just big enough for a man to squeeze into at the bottom, and slowly widening, until at the top the cone was divided into three distinct peaks, on the largest of which the balloon was anchored. Snap had arranged with Dick that three sharp tugs at the lariat meant 'Come along, I can hold you.' First he passed a bit of the lariat round a jutting corner of the broken rock, and then he gave the three tugs agreed upon.