Page:The Campaign of the Jungle.djvu/314

282 When the boy came to his senses, he found it was night and pitch dark under the thick tree, through the branches of which he had fallen. He rested on a bed of soft moss, and this cushionlike substance had most likely saved him from fatal injury.

His first feeling was one of bewilderment, his next that his left foot felt as if it was on fire, with a shooting pain that ran well up to his knee. Catching hold of the foot, he felt that the ankle was much swollen, and that his shoe-top was ready to burst with the pressure. Scarcely realizing what he was doing, he loosened the shoe, at which part of the pain left him.

"I suppose I ought to be thankful that I wasn't killed," he thought, rather dismally. "I wonder where Leroy and that scout are? I don't suppose it will do any good to call for them. The top of that cliff must be a hundred feet from here."

The fall had almost finished what was left of Larry's already ragged suit, and he found himself scratched in a dozen places, with a bad cut over one eye and several splinters in his left hand. Feeling in his pocket, he found several matches which Leroy had given him on leaving the prison cave,