The most difficult part of the enterprise was yet to come. They had to get the boy up on the ledge. To accomplish this at first was a poser, but Blinky finally solved it. Enjoining the rope handlers not to make a move till he hailed them, he slipped down the stone steps and reached the ledge. Arrived there, he peered over into the black void under his feet. Swinging a short distance below, he could distinguish a blacker object than the surrounding night. He could also make out a sound of humming. It was Tubby crooning to himself as he swung on the end of the frail rope: "See-saw! see-saw! On a s-um-mers day!" "Well, I'll be extra special, double-jiggered!" breathed the puncher, as he heard. He knelt on the edge of the ledge and spoke to the vocalist. "How's your nerve, Tubby?" "Fine, but it needs feeding," was the cheerful response. "All right, you'll do," rejoined the cow-puncher. "Now, then, Tubby, I want you to hang to the edge of this ledge by your finger tips for just two minutes. Think you can do it?" "I'll have to, won't I?" innocently inquired the stout youth. "Yes, or----" "Take a tumble," Tubby finished for him. "Never mind about that," spoke Blinky sharply. Then cupping his hands to his mouth, he shouted upward: "Haul away! Slow, now!" He placed his fingers on the taut rope and felt it slip upward through them. "Good old ropes," he murmured; "stretched like a fiddle string and sound as a ship's cable." Presently Tubby was hauled up level with the ledge. "Stop!" roared Blinky. He could have reached over in the darkness, and, catching the stout boy's hands, have hauled him up beside him--he could have, that is if Tubby had been able to assist him by digging his feet into the rock face. But this he could not do, as he was dangling from the lip of the ledge, fully three feet out from the face of the precipice, and with four hundred feet of empty space under the soles of his shoes. Moreover, in such case the cow-puncher would have nothing to brace himself with, and there would have been grave danger of his being dragged over by the other's suspended weight. Instead, therefore--necessity being the mother of invention--he had thought up a daring plan. What this was we shall soon see. "Can you grip the edge with your fingers, Tubby?" whispered the cow-puncher. "Yes," rejoined Tubby, reaching up. "All right, then, grab it--and in Heaven's name, hold on!" With a single swift stroke of his knife, the cow-puncher slashed the rope, leaving Tubby with the loop draped uselessly under his shoulders. The fat boy's hold on the edge of the ledge was all that now lay between him and eternity. Blinky's breath came sharp and hard as he rapidly adjusted the rope around himself just under the shoulders. Then leaning forward, he seized the stout boy's wrists in his steel-muscled grip. "Haul!" he bellowed. The line tautened just as the cow-puncher braced his muscles. "Stop!"