"Wait, I'll reach out and grab it."

"Don't you dare do any such thing!" almost yelled the cow-puncher. "You might lose your balance, and----"

He stopped with a gasp. A jerk had come at the other end of the rope.

Down there, out of sight, Tubby had hold of it. A succession of jerks told the holder of the rope on the cliff edge that he was making the loop fast about him.

"All right!" finally hailed Tubby. Then in imitation of an elevator runner:

"Go--ing up!"

"Hold on a minute," croaked out Blinky, even his iron nerve a trifle shaken now that the crucial moment was near.

He ran back to the tree and took a deft turn round the trunk. Then he extended the end of the rope to the boys and told them to "tail on."

"What are you going to do?" asked Merritt.

"I'm going to stand at the edge of the cliff and transmit orders from below. Mind you, obey them the instant you hear them."

"All right. We will, Blinky," came in chorus.

"Very well. Now hold on and when I tell you to start hauling, pull with all your might. That boy's a heavy load."

"A hundred and forty pounds and still growing," volunteered Harry Harkness.

"Well, that rope held a six-hundred-pound steer, so I guess it'll stand his weight. All I'm afraid of is a knot giving. I made them in the dark, you know."

The cow-puncher, after giving a few more final instructions, ran to the cliff edge.

"All right?" he shouted down.

"All right!" rejoined Tubby.

Blinky straightened up and turned back toward the boys, holding onto the rope.

"Haul away, boys," he ordered.

A cheer burst from the throats of the Boy Scouts as they tailed on the lifeline, and walked backward from the tree with it.

"Whoa!" came a shout from below suddenly.

"Whoa!" yelled Blinky, repeating the word.

"What's the matter?" he hailed down, as the hoisting movement stopped.

"Why, I'm b.u.mping my delicate knees," came up in Tubby's voice.

"Can't be helped," yelled down Blinky. Then hailing the hauling line:--

"Pull away, boys."

Steadily they pulled till the fat boy had been raised twenty feet or more from his tree. Suddenly he hailed Blinky.

"Whoa!" roared the cow-puncher.

Instantly the hoisting ceased.

"Now, what is it, Tubby?"

"I just thought of something."

"What?"

"Say, lots of folks would pay money to see this, wouldn't they?"

"Never mind that now. Are you all right?"

"Yes, except my knees."

"Ha-ul a-way."

The boys on the other end of the rope hauled steadily now, and the fat boy drew nearer and nearer to the ledge.

As he rose higher, hanging suspended like a spider from the end of his gossamer thread between the sky and the ground, a sudden thought struck Blinky. It would be manifestly impossible to haul Tubby over the edge of the ledge which projected like the eaves of a roof. Hardly had the thought flashed across his mind before a shout of alarm came from the boys, simultaneously with a sharp:

Crack!

"The rope!" came a wild yell from the tree.

"It's broken!"

Blinky went white, and his knees shook. At the same instant the rope began to snake hissingly over the edge of the precipice. It had parted.

Tubby was once more dropping downward like a stone.

"Catch it!" roared Blinky, regardless of his own peril, throwing himself onto the fast-retreating rawhide. He gripped it, but was carried like a feather before the wind toward the edge of the cliff by the descending Tubby's weight. In another moment--for he obstinately refused to let go--he would have been over the edge, when the line suddenly tightened.

"Hooray! I've got it."

The shout came in Merritt's voice.

The boy, with great presence of mind, had managed to catch the rope, and secure it before its end whipped round the trunk of the tree. As the knot which had parted was in the section of the rawhide above the tree, this was possible. Had the rope broken between the tree and the cliff both Tubby and Blinky would have been dashed to death.

"What parted?" roared Blinky, as soon as he had recovered his senses.

"One of the knots. It slipped. It's all right, now we've fixed it!"

hailed Merritt back.

"Merritt, you're all right," shouted the cow-puncher, "if it hadn't been for you, I'd have been down among the cattle now. I'd have traveled by lightening express, too."