Chapter XXI: At the Top

'Beat, I think,' said Snap a little later; and, indeed, it looked as if man could go no higher than the point to which, by infinite toil, the boys had now attained.

'You two stay here a little,' he added to the two Winthrops, 'and take care of the grub and the rifle,' for, in spite of the difficulties of the ascent, Wharton had insisted on bringing one rifle and his 'six-shooter,' as well as a handkerchief full of bread per man.

'Dick, you will come with me, won't you?' he asked, and, as the old trapper nodded his head in assent, he added, 'Very well, then: do you get a good grip of something so that you could hold my weight up if necessary, and give me the other end of that lariat round my waist.'

The place to which they had attained was a narrow ledge of granite, ending in a niche in the rock, with an overhanging roof to it. Above was a smooth needle of solid rock, broken and ragged at the summit, but for two hundred feet as smooth and perpendicular as a pillar of marble. There were no crannies in this into which to insert toes and fingers, however strong and daring. The storms and snows of ten thousand years had worn the granite until its face was polished like the face of a jewel, and it was hard as a diamond.

'I don't think even the Alpine Club could tackle that,' Frank had said when they first saw the peak.

'I'm not so sure of that,' Snap answered; 'they couldn't from here, of course, but perhaps there's a way round. Remember, they climbed the Dru.'

And now, with the dogged pluck which characterised the boy, he was going to look for what he called a way round. The position was this. The hollow in which the party lay ended abruptly. Beyond it was the polished rock, without a blade of grass or a twig upon it. Above was two hundred feet of the same, bending, if anything, a little towards the would-be climber, as if the giant spire were about to tumble over into the gulf of clouds and mist which lay below. If any of our little party toppled out of their nest they had a clean run for two or three thousand feet, as old Dick said, and 'nothing of any consequence to hinder 'em between that and the prairie.'

The lariat was fast round old Dick's waist, and securely fastened, too, to Snap's leather belt, which he had taken the precaution of fixing well up under his armpits. A close scrutiny of the rock to the right of the crevice had shown the boys that, though there was no cranny big enough for a sparrow to perch upon above, there was just one narrow, thread-like crack running from the end of their niche towards the sharp edge of the needle, which, jutting out some fifteen feet from them, formed a corner round which they could not see anything.

'That's our chance,' said Snap; 'I can get my fingers in here, and, as I can see it all the way, I expect it gets larger further on.'

All the party looked white and drawn except Snap; it was a desperate risk, and all knew it, and old Dick would gladly have persuaded the boy to rest content with their present quarters. But it was too late now. As the old foreman knelt with his face inwards, gripping the rock, ready at any moment to take the strain which Snap's fall would put upon the rope, the latter was digging his fingers deeply into the solitary crack. He had taken off his moccasins, and was barefooted and in his shirt-sleeves. Even his cap was off. He wanted no encumbrances, however slight, just now. Two or three times he tried his grip, and then, clinging with his bare feet to the smooth rock, he let himself go and hung spread-eagled against the granite wall.

As he hung dangling by the first joints of his fingers over the horrid abyss a cold wind came and struck him. It blew his damp hair back from his face, it seemed to chill his straining fingers, and to threaten to tear him from his precarious hold. But not for one half-second did he hesitate. He had considered the peril and braced himself to meet it. Slowly, a foot at a time, he worked his way along. The first foot or two was the difficult part of his journey, for there, as he shifted his hold, his body hung literally upon four fingers and no more. But he comforted himself with the thought of the stout lariat round his waist and the strong arms which held it in the niche he had left. After the first few feet he was able to get more of his hands into the rock, and, though his eye had not noticed them, his bare feet found little inequalities and rough spots to which they clung like the feet of a fly to the ceiling.

As he drew near the corner his excitement grew, hope and fear alternating in his breast. At last he could look round it, and he saw that the proverb was again justified, 'Where there's a will there's a way.'

'A precious bad way,' thought Snap, 'but still better than this,' and, so thinking, he crept round the corner, and after what had seemed an age to him again got his foot on a firm hold. For here round the corner was a broad ledge, as if made by the falling away from the cone of some great chip of granite when that convulsion had taken place which had rent the cone from its very summit to where he stood. Now too he saw clearly that, though solid on the other side, a great crack ran down the peak on this side, just big enough for a man to squeeze into at the bottom, and slowly widening, until at the top the cone was divided into three distinct peaks, on the largest of which the balloon was anchored.

Snap had arranged with Dick that three sharp tugs at the lariat meant 'Come along, I can hold you.' First he passed a bit of the lariat round a jutting corner of the broken rock, and then he gave the three tugs agreed upon.

With eyes shut and heart beating he clung to the rock, and prayed that Dick might not slip. It seemed an hour of waiting until he heard a loud gasp at his side, and Dick's voice panting out:

'Wal, I reckon that's summat of a crawl, but blow me if I think Natur' ever meant me to do them bluebottle tricks.'

As he spoke it seemed as if a thaw had suddenly set in in Snap's heart, the relief was so great, and, clinging hard to the rocks, they both laughed until the boys in the crevice heard them, and wished that they were there to share in the merriment.

'Wal, now, Snap, what next? You couldn't set us an easier one this time, now, could you?' asked Dick.

'Yes, Dick, it's not so bad this time, it's only what mountaineers call a chimney, and then we shall be there.'

'Oh, only a chimney, he says,' muttered Dick; 'fust you turns bluebottle, then you turns sweep--all quite natural, of course--and then you're there. And, unless we turn balloonatics when we git there, there, it seems to me, we'll stick!'

'You follow me, Dick,' said Snap, 'and do as I do; shove your elbows and knees against the opposite sides of the crack as soon as you have room to, and wriggle up.'

Dick obeyed, talking away to himself all the while, so that, had the danger been less, the inclination to laugh would have taken the strength out of Snap's arms and let him down with a crash.

'Look out for stones, Dick!' cried Snap all at once, as a few great fragments of granite came rattling down.

'All right, sonny,' cried the voice from below; 'never mind the "sut," but tell us when the top brick's a-comin'.'

'Now, Dick,' said Snap, after about fifty feet of this work, 'you'll have to shove your back and hands against one side and your feet against the other, like this, and shove your way up so.'

'All right, pard, I understand: I've got to sit on about 5,000 feet of nothing at all and keep going up'ards. Quite simple. Go ahead!'

'Hang it, Dick, do be serious,' replied Snap, laughing.

'Well, so I am, ain't I?' replied the old man; 'you don't suppose I'm here for enjoyment, do you?'

Snap, looking down between his legs at the cowboy below him, would have exploded with laughter had he dared to. The old chap was growling away to himself, and puffing and blowing with the unusual exercise, but gripping the rock with hands like eagles' claws, and pushing with his strong legs until, as Snap told him afterwards, he was in momentary dread of seeing the opposite wall come down.

'Now hold on a bit, Dick,' cried the voice above after a pause, 'and toss that lariat up my way if you can.'

There was a good deal of grumbling, but at last the lariat lay across Snap's legs, and, getting hold of it, he made cast after cast at a little spike of rock some ten feet above him. It was difficult shooting with a noose at such a mark in such a position, and he heartily wished old Dick could change places with him. But that was impossible.

'I reckon my back 'll hold out about three more shies, Snap,' said the voice from below; 'there ain't much starch left in it.'

'All right, Dick,' replied Snap, 'I've lassoed the rock now, firm and fast. One minute!'

The old man saw the boy hang on to the rope and scramble by its help to the point above mentioned.

'Now, Dick!' he cried, and Dick caught the rope and scrambled up after his companion.

'All easy-going now, like going upstairs,' said Snap; and so indeed it was, for the two were now on the last torn pinnacle of the summit, which was so cracked and riven that a child could have climbed it.

'Poor chap! So that's his story!' exclaimed Wharton ten minutes later, as a great bird, gorged and heavy, rose sullenly from a cup-like hollow in the top of the main peak and slid on silent wings into the deep sky beyond.

Where the bird rose, lay what had been a man, and that not many days ago; but the elements and the fowls of heaven had not left enough of the poor clay to tell whether he was white or red. On closer inspection a grey Tyrolese hat with green riband, and tuft of izzard's hair set in it as a plume, told Snap even his nationality, and a broken pair of spectacles confirmed his guess and almost enabled him to re-clothe those poor bones in his mind's eye with the very flesh of the German professor which once covered them.

The balloon, which was still well inflated, had dragged its anchor amongst these rocks and at last struck a firm hold amongst them, and still, as they reached it, tugged and strained at its mooring with a semblance of life in ghastly contrast to the everlasting peace which had fallen upon its helmsman and master.

'The jerk when that there thing pulled up sudden chucked him out, I guess,' said Dick, pointing at the bones; 'and look here, it's broke his arm in two places, and his thigh. Poor wretch, pity but what he didn't fall clear over the edge anyway!'

'That's not what he thought, Dick,' said Snap, who had picked up a log-book which lay by the dead man's side and bore on its cover of calf-skin more than one mark of the vulture's prying beak. '"Gott sei Dank," he begins--and it looks as if he had written it in his own blood, poor fellow--"thank God," he says, "that I shall have time to write----"'

'Yes, well, never mind that now, pard; I guess we'll have lots of time to read that by-and-by. There ain't much room up here, and I guess we'd better go as near giving this foreigner Christian burial as circumstances will allow; you don't happen to recollect a prayer as will suit, do you now, Snap?'

'What do you mean, Wharton? you can't dig a grave in this rock.'

'No, lad, I know that,' he replied, 'and I ain't goin' to try. But we've got to live here, maybe some days, and there's hardly room for us as are alive, even if dead men's society was as attractive as it ain't.'

Whilst he spoke the old man had approached the figure, which half lay, half sat, in the hollow, its limbs broken and its face torn away by birds of prey. Reverently the old man lifted his hat, saying to the thing at his feet:

'You'll forgive us, pard, but we're kinder cramped for room up here, and if so be as you're gone aloft a few thousand feet more or less between you and these bones of yourn won't make no odds.'

Snap looked at Dick in some horror, but the old man's manner was so reverent and yet so determined that he did not interfere.

Tearing a rug, which before his strength left him he must have got somehow or other from the car of the balloon, into fine strips, Dick spliced them together into a cord. Then he rolled the remains up in the long cloak in which they lay, wound his cord of strips round and round it, and then turned again to Snap:

'Snap, my lad, don't take on at what I'm doing,' he said; 'there ain't no place for the dead among the living, nor can be neither. You don't believe as these bones is him, do you? Very well, then, I want you to help me bury them down there,' and the foreman pointed out over the brink of the precipice.

The afternoon had passed now, and one or two stars were beginning to show faintly in the sky. Down below, the mists were rising thickly from the wet bottom-lands and from the bed of the stream, and were drifting through the gorges of the mountains and up and up, until, looking over from then: dizzy stand, Dick and Snap saw nothing but heaving billows of heavy white clouds. It wanted but very little fancy to imagine that those clouds were white waves breaking round the base of the cliff on which they stood.

'Take the other end of the pack, Snap,' commanded Wharton; 'now, boy, have you got a prayer handy?'

'No, Dick,' faltered Snap, 'I don't know what to say.'

'Then just you do as I do,' said the old man, 'just say good-bye to the poor chap; I remember a mate told me years agone that good-bye meant "God be with you." I reckon that ain't a bad prayer.'

With his head averted the boy did as he was told.

'Good-bye,' said Dick, 'good-bye, pard!'--and 'good-bye' echoed Snap--their voices sounding faint and strange as they stood up there close to the stars, with the white clouds below and the dead man between them.

'Swing it, Snap, and let go,' said Wharton, and the boy's hands let go as the light burden which they bore flew outwards over the edge.

By some fascination which he could not resist Snap looked down, and saw the dreadful bale spin round and down with awful velocity, until as it plunged into the billowy clouds of mist for a moment he fancied an arm broke loose from its bandages and stretched up towards him as the body disappeared from view.

And then all was over. No sound came back to tell them that it had reached its resting-place. The stars stood still in the heavens, and Snap hated them for their cold, unsympathising stare. The granite rocks looked cold and hard and terrible, and the sky itself looked as hard and as merciless as the rocks.

A strong hand gripped Snap's shoulder at that moment, and a kind, strong voice was in his ear:

'Come out of that, lad; if you look over them rocks any longer they'll kinder draw you down after him.'