Part 29 (2/2)

”Dizzy?” the doctor asked Tom, noting the expression that had come over the scout's face.

”No,” said Tom. ”But I feel as if I would be if I looked down.”

The doctor eyed him sharply. ”I guess you're all right,” he said.

”Remember, you'll be anch.o.r.ed fast, and look hard at your footing, focus on that, and don't see off at all. All ready, Mills.”

The Ranger walked out on the ledge quite calmly, a little sideways, so he could lean back toward the cliff, and tested each step to see that the ledge was firm and his spikes were gripping. Then the doctor went, even more coolly than Mills. Tom swallowed a lump in his throat, called himself a ”poor mut,” and when he had the signal, followed the others.

He kept his eyes on the ledge, as the doctor told him, though there was a horribly fascinating and indescribable temptation to peep from the corners of them down over the edge. He could feel the doctor taking up the slack of the rope as he came, so that with each step his fall would be shorter if he fell. Then, suddenly, he was over! He had been cold before he started, with a chill in his back as the wind evaporated the perspiration. Now he was suddenly hot again, and the sweat came out on his forehead.

The doctor was smiling at him.

”That's your real initiation in rock climbing,” he said. ”You're going good. Keep it up!”

The new ledge brought them to the big gully (the one you see, filled with snow, in the picture). It still had some snow in places when the party reached it, but for the most part it was clear, though there was a tiny trickle of water at the bottom. It was a great, rough, jagged trough scooped out of the cliff by ages of running snow water, and inclined at an angle not very far off the perpendicular.

”Not quite a real chimney,” the doctor said briefly. ”It's too big and open, and you can't stretch from side to side. Looks as if we'd have to watch out for stones, too.”

”You will,” said Mills.

Even as he spoke, they heard a noise above them, and the Ranger yelled, ”Jump for shelter!”

All three sprang to one side of the gully, below a projecting shelf of rock, and past them, thundering down the chute, went a stone as big as a bucket, just loosened by melting snow above.

Tom watched it go past, and began to think the last place on the rope was not the softest berth he could imagine.

The doctor now turned to him. ”You see what you've got to look out for, Tom,” he said. ”For each fresh climb, we'll pick a place where there is shelter for the man waiting below. But you've still got to be on the watch, and dodge quick. This is going to be a regular climb!”

It was! For the next three hours Tom did the liveliest and the hardest work he had ever put in. He had no chance to get dizzy looking down, for he never even dared to look down. He looked up, never knowing when the next stone or even shower of stones would descend upon him, and prepared every second to spring to right or left to dodge them. They climbed by sending Mills out from under a protecting ledge and letting him s.h.i.+n up his fifty feet. Then the doctor would follow, and when he was up with Mills, Tom would emerge from under the shelter, and join them. Then they would repeat the process. But even with Mills and the doctor standing still above him, Tom had to look out for rocks. They were always coming down, loosened by the melting snow above, as well as by the feet of the climbers.

And it was hard work, too. Not only was the gully tremendously steep, but it was rough, in places wet and slippery, and finally half full of snow. When they reached the snow, their worst troubles came, for they had no ice axes to make steps, and without steps they could not climb on the snow, it was so steep. They had to work up the side of the gully, by whatever toe holds they could find. The gully was steeper than a flight of very steep stairs--in places, indeed, it was almost perpendicular,--and Tom's breath began to come hard and his legs tremble with weariness. But Mills kept plugging upward, and the towering, upright pinnacles of the summit began to loom nearer and nearer.

Finally Mills, without warning, turned out of the gully, close to its top, and swung out on a wide ledge right under the final two or three hundred feet of the climb. On this ledge, which didn't show from below, was a regular little garden of moss campion and Alpine wild flowers.

”Goat food,” said Mills, shortly. He had hardly spoken a word since the first bad place, and the doctor had been equally silent They sat down to rest on this wide ledge, and looked off at last upon the great prospect below them, with the lake, like a little green mirror now, far beneath.

”Wonderful!” the doctor exclaimed. ”A magnificent balcony seat we have in this amphitheatre, and no ushers to bother us. Mills, you're a good climber--you don't talk.”

Mills smiled. ”Never knew a safe mountain man who did talk on a cliff or a glacier,” said he.

”No, you can't watch your footing and gabble at the same time. Bah! how I hate a talker on a climb!”

”A man came out here once in a big party,” said the Ranger. ”I took 'em up Cleveland. When we hit the real climb, he fetched out a sign from his pack, and hung it on his back. It read, 'I'm not very sociable when I'm climbing.'”

The doctor and Tom laughed, and the former added, ”There's a wise man!”

The ledge on which they sat, which was like a little secret garden hung up here two thousand feet above the lake, was covered with goat tracks, and Mills pointed out several little caves, too, under overhanging rocks, where, he said, the kids were probably born. Above them, the last three hundred feet of the cliff went up perfectly straight, and Tom didn't see how they were going to get any farther.

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