and essayed to guide the tip of the wavering life-raft to some more or less stable foundation. It was no easy matter, for the end slipped and slid and refused to come to anchor, and the girl at last was forced to sit down on the roof cross-legged, in order to retain her balance and still keep the swaying stretcher in place when the gusts of wind came down the mountain and threatened to tear it from their grasp and send it after the bed, far down in the valley below.
At last, after much labor and heart-breaking experiment, the end of the chair became wedged among the branches and braced fairly firmly; and Dick, having tried it tentatively, expressed himself as ready to undertake the perilous passage. It was only a few feet horizontally, but a thousand feet perpendicularly, and he was both cramped and dizzy, but it was now or never. Waiting for a moment when a gust had just passed them by, he stood up on the frail raft, grasped a swaying branch of ironwood, and made the fateful dash for safety or destruction.
It proved to be safety, and in a moment he was standing upon the firm roof, while the chair went careening down over the precipice and landed in the branches of a kukui tree far below.
The girl rose to her feet as soon as he had landed upon the roof beside her, and there was no longer laughter in her face. "Now," she said coolly, "you
