"If there is nothing to fear, we will go out on the plain; the day is
too good to be lost in words, like women in the towns wrangling over
their tea and sugared cakes."
Without waiting for approbation or dissent, the squatter advanced to
the base of the rock, which formed a sort of perpendicular wall,
nearly twenty feet high around the whole acclivity. Ishmael, however,
directed his footsteps to a point where an ascent might be made
through a narrow cleft, which he had taken the precaution to fortify
with a breast-work of cottonwood logs, and which, in its turn, was
defended by a chevaux-de-frise of the branches of the same tree. Here
an armed man was usually kept, as at the key of the whole position,
and here one of the young men now stood, indolently leaning against
the rock, ready to protect the pass, if it should prove necessary,
until the whole party could be mustered at the several points of
defence.
From this place the squatter found the ascent still difficult, partly
by nature and partly by artificial impediments, until he reached a
sort of terrace, or, to speak more properly, the plain of the
elevation, where he had established the huts in which the whole family
dwelt.
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