American planter who raises tobacco and chews the unprepared leaf. Now
Peters was a lover of tobacco, and the sight of this action, so
suggestive of his loved weed, excited him greatly, as he had not so much
as seen a scrap of tobacco for months. When it developed that it was
tobacco that Medosus had placed in his mouth, and that in some of the
valleys between these mountains a species of wild tobacco grew, Peters
was determined to have some of it, the craving of months seeming so near
to gratification; and he asked Medosus to give him a little of it, to
last until he could procure a fuller supply. Medosus was perfectly
willing to grant this request; but on rolling up a wad and attempting to
throw it across the chasm, it fell into the abyss and fluttered downward
to the water nearly two miles below. He was about to make a second
effort, when Peters stopped him, and then a pretty, though a really
terrible thing happened--to relate which was the real purpose of this
digression from my story proper.

"Peters was at the moment standing some fifteen feet from the edge of
the chasm, the chasm being at this point about twenty feet in
width--twenty feet in width, and even here, where it was two thousand
feet less in depth than it was a mile higher up, at least eight thousand
feet in descent--sheer to the raging torrent and the huge, jagged
lava-bowlders below. It was all done so quickly that none of the party
had time to become alarmed. Peters, whose arms when he hung them reached
to within four inches of his feet, stooped just enough to bring his
hands to the ground. Then, as a lame man using crutches might swing
himself along, but with lightning-like swiftness, Peters took two rapid
jumps toward the edge of the chasm, the second jump landing him directly
on its edge. Then he shot up and out into the air over that awful abyss,
and landed on the opposite side as gently as a cat lands from a six-foot
leap; and it did not seem to require of him an unusual effort. He