The Colonel looked around him, for a moment, with a wild thought of trying to reach it himself; the next he put it away as worse than folly. There was no rope, nothing to hold him or his sister; and if there had been, who was there to support and guide it? No one but a weak woman and two little children. He himself was a tall man, of no light weight, and with a lame foot: the attempt was sure to bring destruction upon himself, his sister, and her husband.