Chapter XXII: At the End of the Rope

'I guess our young 'uns will be feeling as if the old birds had deserted,' said Dick after a time. 'How do you reckon to get them up, Snap?'

'Well, I've just been looking over the top of that other point,' said Snap, indicating one of the other points of the peak, 'and I find we can get down pretty easily to within about 150 feet of them, but from there down it's like ice, the rock is so smooth.'

'Let's see if we can pull this balloon in,' said Dick; 'may be, there is a rope in the car;' and as he spoke he and Snap got hold of the rope which held the captive balloon, and hauled on it. To their surprise it came in easily, though now and then it gave a tug which threatened to jerk them off their feet. When they had got it so close that they could see into the car Snap was on the point of getting in.

'Steady, boy, hold on! If you let go I may not be able to keep her down, and then there you'll be hung up like a bird in a cage,' roared Dick.

'Well, what are we going to do?' panted Snap.

'Just pay out the rope again steadily, pard; don't let it go with a jerk, whatever you do,' replied Wharton.

'And now?' asked Snap when the balloon was once more at the end of its tether.

'Now,' replied Dick, 'we'll make another halter for that there airy steed. Lend us the lariat.'

Taking off his belt, which fastened with a great metal hook, Wharton cut the latter off the belt and fastened it to one end of the lariat; the other end he made fast to a rock.

'Now, my lad,' said he, holding the hook in his teeth, 'haul him in again,' and, yo-ho-ing like sailors at the capstan, they soon had the balloon alongside.

'Bear on the rope with all your might, pard!' said Dick, leaning back and throwing all his weight on one hand, whilst with the other he hitched the hook at the end of the lariat into one of the ropes round the car.

'Now let go, you can let her rip! I guess she'll not break away from them moorings,' said Dick; 'and if you'll get in and look what there is inside you'll have no trouble in getting out again and no fear of being flown away with.'

In another minute Snap was in the car, and cried out to Dick: 'Hurrah! here is everything we want; heaps of rugs and two coils of rope; but it's very thin stuff,' he added.

'Chuck it out, my boy!' cried Wharton, and two coils of new yellow hemp came tumbling to his feet, followed by a buffalo-robe and two blankets.

'Four-point blankets!' remarked Dick, 'and a thirty-dollar robe, anyway. Is there anything else?'

'Yes,' replied the boy, 'some instruments--a dozen, I should think--a big flask, a big pipe, and a lot of round tins of provisions with "Silver, Cornhill" on them.'

'Throw them down, Snap, I'll catch them,' cried Dick, 'and bring the pipe and the flask with you, and then we'll try to get to the boys.'

Snap obeyed, and in another minute swung himself out of the car and dropped beside his companion.

'It is pretty thin rope, this,' remarked Dick, handling one of the coils which Snap had thrown to him, 'but it seems uncommonly strong too. What is this, anyway?' he added, pointing to a thin red strand which ran through the rope.

Snap looked at it for a moment, and then, clapping his hand on Dick's shoulder, rejoined, 'We're right now, old chap; that is an Alpine Club rope, or at any rate made like them, and is as tough as wire. Whales wouldn't break it or razors cut it, never fear; if it's long enough we'll have Towzer and Frank up here in no time.'

By splicing the ropes together Snap found that he could just reach his friends, so that he and Dick started without more ado, and, climbing down the chimney again for some time, got on to its other wall, and thence to a point from which the rope could be lowered to Frank's crevice. As it hung for some time unnoticed by the boys, Dick began to fidget.

'I reckon they've gone to sleep. That Towzer's a holy terror for slumbering,' he remarked.

'They can't have fallen out, can they, Dick?' asked Snap anxiously.

'No, no, not they!' replied he; 'and I expect it's just because they don't want to that we don't get a bite at our line. Swing it in a bit if you can; you see they daren't reach out for it.'

'True for you!' said Snap, and began vigorously to agitate the rope. But he soon found that it requires time and considerable skill to make the end of a rope 200 ft. long obey your bidding, and he was almost in despair, when the rope suddenly began as it were of itself to swing in the right direction.

'At last!' he ejaculated as the rope after swinging in a little further than usual failed to return.

On the end of the rope they had fastened a note to Towzer in these words: 'Tie Frank on to the line securely, give two tugs when you are ready, and let him swing out gently; we'll haul him up.'

It seems easy enough to do when you only read about it, but to a man crouching in a cranny in the rock, with thousands of feet of a sheer fall below him and no twig even for his hands to clutch, it is a terrible thing to tie the rope under his arms and let himself go out into space, one thin thread only connecting him with this world--a mere atom swinging helplessly in space. What if the rope should break? what if the friendly hands above should grow cramped, or even if their strength should fail for a moment? What? Why, only a short, sharp rush through the air, and then--long rest! The right way to manage such an ascent is, of course, to have a bar at the end of your rope. On this the person to be hauled up sits, one leg on either side of the rope, and face inwards, so that by touching the rock with the feet the climber may steer himself a little or at any rate resist that tendency to spin round like a roasting-jack which is so terrible.

Never did a rope take more adjusting than that rope round Frank. Towzer tried every knot and every strand again and again with desperate care. He felt that his brother's life depended on him, and when he said good-bye before giving those two terrible tugs the tears rushed to the poor boy's eyes and his hands clung to Frank's as if they would never leave them.

Up at the top, too, those two strong men were gazing anxiously into each other's faces. It was a long pull, and Frank a terribly heavy fellow. If he began to swing, could they get him up? It was a heavy responsibility, but one at least out of the two felt that, rather than let go of the rope which held the man whose life was entrusted to him, that rope should drag him too over the cliff to the hereafter.

And then the tugs came, sharp and firm, Frank's brave old fist giving them, and he even managed to make a poor little joke as he swung out, although he knew it was useless, for Towzer had turned and was cowering breathless, his eyes hidden against the back of the little cave. The young one felt as if his brother had gone to execution and his hand had sent him.

Steadily foot by foot the rope came home, the two men coiling it round a rough natural pillar of rock as they got it in, until they saw Frank's hands grip the top; and then with one great pull they dragged him roughly over, 'high and dry,' as Wharton said, out of the great deep. What matter if that last pull tore his clothes on the ragged granite and hurt his wounded arm? It was pleasant even to be hurt by the solid rock beneath you after dangling so long in mid-air.

Dick and Snap lay down, like dogs who have done a hard day's work, flat on their bellies. Cold as it was, the perspiration poured from their faces and their limbs trembled with fatigue and excitement, so that they could not stand upright. To Frank they hardly spoke. By-and-by each came and shook hands in silence--that was all. Then Dick spoke:

'Snap, we must get young Towzer up; there are three now, and he is only a light weight.'

Carefully they overhauled every inch of the rope and then let it down again. This time it was soon caught, and they all stood back and waited for the tug. When it came they all hauled with a will.

'Why, he's no weight at all,' said Snap after taking in the first handful or two of slack rope.

'That's just it!' said Wharton, 'there is no one on the rope; you hold hard whilst I go and look,' and as he spoke Dick went to the edge and looked over.

'No!' he sang out, 'there's no one on; let the rope go again, there must be some mistake.'

Again the rope swung into the crevice, was caught, held, and returned, and again no one was on it.

This time the men hauled it up, thinking Towzer must have found some fault in the rope. All that they found was a note and these words: 'Dear Frank, forgive; I know I'm a little idiot, but I can't come. I should go mad if I saw myself hanging by that thread. I'll stay here until to-morrow, and then perhaps I can get down and up some other way. Don't mind me, it's awfully jolly here.--TOWZER.'

'"Awfully jolly here!" poor little chap, he's got the horrors, and if we leave him he'll go looking over until he can't help throwing himself down,' said Dick. 'Let's go to him, one of us.'

'No!' said Frank, and his voice sounded hard and cruel, and his fair skin was all aflame, 'we'll send this down, please;' and with shaking hand he wrote: 'For shame, remember you are a Winthrop; will you let these fellows see that you are afraid?'

At his word the two sound men lowered the rope again, and this time when the tugs came there was a weight at the end of it--a weight that swung and spun and tried their strength more even than Frank had done. At last they dragged him to the top, and as his head came over the edge they looked to see his hands grip the ground, but in vain! Like a log he rolled on the top and lay there, his head hanging limply, like the head of a dead snowdrop, and Frank wrung his hands as he thought that his pride had killed 'the little one.'

'It's all right, pard, don't you take on like that,' said Wharton cheerfully; 'he's swooned away or gone to sleep with dizziness. He'll come round again directly.'

Picking the boy up gently, they got him across to the nest, as Dick called the hollow by the balloon.

'Better carry him like this than if he was awake and mad with fright, poor chap,' said Wharton; and then, when he had rolled his charge up in a buffalo-robe, and poured some spirits from the flask down his throat, he begged the other two to lie down and rest.

'We shall want all our strength if we mean living through the next few days,' said the old foreman, 'and I can't do with more nor one invalid at a time.'

By-and-by Towzer came round, but his eyes were wild and his mouth twitched, so that he could hardly speak distinctly. Wharton noticed Frank's face as he watched his brother, and, coming over to him, he laid a great knotted fist on the elder Winthrop's shoulder:

'Look here, my lad,' he said, 'I saw what you wrote, and I let it go, because I knowed that if we didn't get the boy up to-night we'd never see him again: but don't you get thinking hard things about your brother. He's got grit enough for anything. Pluck's a matter of constitootion, and his is just upon played out. He'll be better when he has had some grub and a sleep. Now give us a match,' and, selecting one from the bundle offered to him, he solemnly lifted a leg, rubbed the match smartly on the seat of his trousers, and applied it to the bottom of one of the provision tins before alluded to.

'Well,' Snap said, 'that's ingenious; how did you know how to manage them?'

'How?' replied Dick, 'I guess if you'd lived the life I have you'd know all a man can know about tinned meat. Why, blow me if I don't think you could start a dividend-paying tin-mine where we first lived when we started ranching on the Rosebud, and all the tin you'd ever find there came outside our grub.'

'Oh, I've seen tinned meats before, Dick,' answered Snap, 'but a tinned fire to cook it by, that's what gets over me.'

The tin in question was an ingenious contrivance with a roll of wick saturated with spirit underneath the tin pot, which held (in this instance) an excellent curried fowl. A roll of soft lead covers the saturated wick, and all the traveller has to do is to tear off the lead and light the wick. In ten minutes' time the curry will be ready, and if then he is not satisfied with his supper the traveller must be very hard to please. Whoever invented these ingenious tins deserves a monument to be erected to his memory by the hunters, travellers, mountaineers, and others whom he has fed.

After doing substantial justice to the fare before them, or, as Dick put it, 'after wolfing two of them tins,' and drinking more whisky neat than they had ever done at one sitting before, even Towzer began to recover. But Dick wouldn't hear of his talking, and at the first attempt rolled him up in a buffalo-rug and, sitting solemnly down on his legs, lit the great pipe of the German professor.

In ten minutes, to all intents and purposes, Dick was alone, for, though the bodies of the three boys breathed at his side, their minds were far away in the land of dreams and slumber. For some time the old man puffed away in silence--the stars above winking solemnly down at him as he kept that one bright spark alight with infinite care, close to the end of his nose.

'I'm jiggered if I don't think they're a-laughin' at us,' he muttered, looking at the stars, 'and I don't wonder. It's been a pretty tough job gettin' here, but how we're goin' to get out beats me. Howsomdever, Dick, my lad, bed!--bed-rock it is, my hearty!' and, grumbling and growling, he poked his finger into his pipe, extinguished the ashes, and crawled under a corner of Towzer's robe.