Yet he would go to Collinson's first.
At the end of two hours he reached the thick-set wood that gave upon the shelf at the top of the grade which descended to the mill.

As he emerged from the wood into the bursting sunlight of the valley below, he sharply reined in his horse and stopped.

Another bound would have been his last.

For the shelf, the rocky grade itself, the ledge below, and the mill upon it, were all gone! The crumbling outer wall of the rocky grade had slipped away into immeasurable depths below, leaving only the sharp edge of a cliff, which incurved towards the woods that had once stood behind the mill, but which now bristled on the very edge of a precipice.

A mist was hanging over its brink and rising from the valley; it was a full-fed stream that was coursing through the former dry bed of the river and falling down the face of the bluff.