by Zane Grey
His story was short. He reminded his rescuers of the little spring on the hill at the point where the wreck had occurred. The ice that always spread across the track and over the edge of the gulch had been chopped out by the shovellers the afternoon before, but water trickling from the rock had laid a fresh trap for unwary feet during the night. In jumping from the gangway at the moment of the wreck Blood’s heels had landed on smooth ice and he had tumbled and slid six hundred feet. Recovering consciousness at the bottom of a washout he found the calf of one leg ripped a little, as he put it. The loss of one side of his mustache, swept away in the slide, and leaving on his face a peculiarly forlorn expression, he did not take account of—declaring on the whole, as he smiled into the swimming eyes around him, that with the exception of tobacco he was doing very well.
They got him in front of a big fire, plied him with food and stimulants, and Glover, from a surgical packet, bandaged anew the wound in his leg. Then came the question of retreat.
They discussed two plans. The first to retrace their steps entirely; the second, to go back to where the gap could be attempted and the western track gained below the hill. Each meant long and severe climbing, each presented its particular difficulties, and three men of the four felt that if the torn artery opened once more their victory would be barren—that Blood needed surgical aid promptly if at all. But Dancing had a third plan.
It was while they still consulted at this point that their fire was seen on Pilot Hill and reported to Bucks at the Brock car, from which the rapidly moving party had been seen only at long intervals during the morning.
The fire was the looked-for signal that the superintendent had been reached, and the word went from group to group of men up the hill. Through the strong glass that Glover had left with her, Gertrude could see the smoke, and the storming signals of the panting engines above her made sweeter music after she caught with her eye the faint column in the distant gap. Even her father, feeling still something like a conscript, brightened up at the general rejoicing. He had produced his own glass and let Gertrude with eager prompting help him to find the smoke. The moment the position of Glover’s party was made definite, Bucks ordered the car run down the Hog’s Back to a point so much closer that across the broad cañon, flanking Pilot on the south, they could make out with their glasses the figures of the three men and, when they began to move, the smaller figure of Morris Blood.
Callahan had joined his chief to watch the situation, and they speculated as to how the four would get out of the gulf in which they were completely hemmed. Gertrude and her father stood near.
The eyes of the two bronzed railroad men at her side were like pilot guides to Gertrude. When she lost the wayfarers in the gullies or along the narrow defiles that gave them passage between towering rocks, their eyes restored the plodding line. Callahan was the first to detect the change from the expected course. “They are working east,” said he, after a moment’s careful observation.
“East?” echoed Bucks. “You mean west.”
Callahan hung to his glass. “No,” he repeated, “east—and south. Here.”
Bucks took the glass and looked a long time. “I do not understand,” said he; “they are certainly working east. What can they be after, east? Well, they can’t go very far that way without bridging the Devil’s Cañon. Callahan,” he exclaimed, with sure instinct, “they will head south. Walt now till they appear again.”
He relinquished the glass to explain to Mr. Brock where next to look for them. There was a long interval during which they did not reappear. Then the little file emerging from the shadow of a rock skirted a field of snow straight to the south. There were but three men in line. One, a little ahead, breaking path; following, two large men tramping close together, the foremost stooping under the weight of a man lying face upward on his back, while the man behind supported the legs under his arms.
“They are carrying Morris Blood. He is hurt—that was to be expected. What?” exclaimed Bucks, hardly a moment afterward, “they are crossing the snow. Callahan, by heaven, they are walking for the south side of Pilot, that’s what it means. It is a forced march; they are making for the mines.”
Mount Pilot, from the crest that divides at Devil’s Gap, rises abruptly in a three-faced peak, the pinnacle of which lies to the south. Several hundred feet above the base lie the group of gold-mines behind the mountain, and a short railroad spur blasted across the southern face runs to them from Glen Tarn. Below, the mountain wall breaks in long steps almost vertically to the base, toward which Glover’s party was heading.
The move made new dispositions necessary. Orders flew from Bucks like curlews, for it was more essential than ever to open the hill speedily.
The private car was run across the Hog’s Back, and the news sent to the rotary crew with injunctions to push with all effort as far at least as the mine switch, that help might be sent out on the spur to meet the party on the climb.
The increased activity apparent far up and down the mountain as the word went round, the bringing up of the last reserve engines for the hill battery, the effort to get into communication by telegraph with the mine hospital and Glen Tarn Springs, the feverish haste of the officials in the car to make the new dispositions, all indicated to Gertrude the approach of a crisis—the imminence of a supreme effort to save one life if the endeavor enlisted the men and resources of the whole division. New gangs of shovellers strung on flat-cars were being pushed forward. Down the hill, spent and disabled engines were returning from the front, and while they took sidings, fresh engines, close-coupled, steamed slowly like leviathans past them up the hill.
The moment the track was clear, the private car was backed again down the ridge. Following the serpentine winding of the right of way, the general manager was able to run the car far around the mountain, and it stopped opposite the southern face, which rose across the broad cañon. When the party in the car got their glasses fixed, the little company beyond the gulf had begun their climb and were strung like marionettes up the base of Pilot.
The south face of the mountain, sheer for nearly a thousand feet, is broken by narrow ledges that make an ascent possible, and not until the peak passes the timber does snow ordinarily find lodgment upon that side. Swept by the winds from the Spanish Sinks, the vertical reaches above the base usually offer no obstruction to a rapid climb, though except perhaps by early prospectors, the arête had never been scaled. Glover, however, in locating, had covered every stretch of the mountain on each of its sides, and Dancing’s poles and brackets, like banderillas stung into the tough hide of a bull, circled Pilot from face to face. These two men were leading the ascent; below them could be distinguished the roadmaster and the injured superintendent.
Stripped to the belt and lashed in the party rope, the leader, gaunt and sinewy, stretched like an earthworm up the face of the arête—crossing, recrossing, climbing, retreating, his spiked feet settling warily into fresh holes below, his sensitive hands spreading like feelers high over the smooth granite for new holds above. Slowly, always, and with the deliberate reserve that quieted with confidence the feverish hearts watching across the gulf, the leaders steadily scaled the height that separated them from the track. Like sailors patiently warping home, the three men in advance drew and lifted the fourth, who doughtily helped himself with foot and hand as chance allowed and watched patiently from below while his comrades disputed with the sheer wall for a new step above.
Bucks and Callahan, following every move, mapped the situation to their companions as its features developed. With each triumph on the arête, bursts of commendation and surprise came from the usually taciturn men watching the struggle with growing wonder. Bucks, apprehensive of delays in the track-opening on the hill, sent Callahan back in the car with instructions to pick a gang of ten men and pack them somewhom across the snow to the mine spur, that they might be ready to meet the climbing party and
carry the superintendent down to the mine hospital.
Thirty feet below the mine track and as far above where Glover at that moment was sitting—his rope made fast and his legs hanging over a ledge, while his companions reached new positions—a granite wall rises to where the upper face has been blasted away from the roadbed. To the east, this wall hangs without a break up or down for a hundred feet, but to the west it roughens and splits away from the main spur, forming a crevice or chimney from two to three feet wide, opening at the top to ten feet, where a small bridge carries the track across it. This chimney had been Dancing’s quest from the moment the ascent began, for he had lost a man in that chimney when stringing the mine wires, and knew precisely what it was.
The chimney once gained, Dancing figured that the last thirty feet should be easy work, and he had made but one miscalculation—when he had descended it to pull up his lineman, it was summer. Without extraordinary difficulty, Glover gained the ledge where the chimney opened and waited for his companions to ascend. When all were up, they rested a few moments on their dizzy perch, and, while Bill Dancing investigated the chimney, Glover took the chance to renew once more Morris Blood’s bandages, which, strained by the climbing, caused continual anxiety.
Bucks, with the party in his glass, could see every move. He saw Dancing disappear into the rock while his comrades rested, and made him out, after some delay, reappearing from the cleft. What he could not make out was the word that Dancing brought back; the chimney was a solid mass of ice.
Standing with the two men, Gertrude used her glass constantly. Frequently she asked questions, but frequently she divined ahead of her companions the directions and the movements. The hesitation that followed Dancing’s return did not escape her. Up and down the narrow step on which they stood, the three men walked, scanning anxiously the wall that stretched above them.
So, hounds at fault on a trail double on their steps and move uneasily to and fro, nosing the missing scent. As lions flatten behind their cagebars, the climbers laid themselves against the rock and pushed to the right and the left seeking an avenue of escape. They had every right to expect that help would already have reached them, but on the hill, through haste and confusion of orders, the new rotary had stripped a gear, and an hour had been lost in getting in the second plough. For safety, the climbers had in their predicament nothing to fear. The impelling necessity for action was the superintendent’s condition; his companions knew he could not last long without a surgeon.
When suspense had become unbearable, Dancing re-entered the chimney. He was gone a long time. He reappeared, crawling slowly out on an unseen footing, a mere flaw in the smooth stretch of granite half way up to the track. By cutting his rope and throwing himself a dozen times at death, old Bill Dancing had gained a foothold, made fast a line, and divided the last thirty feet to be covered. One by one, his companions disappeared from sight—not into the chimney, but to the side of it where Dancing had blazed a few dizzy steps and now had a rope dangling to make the ascent practicable.
One by one, Gertrude saw the climbers, reappearing above, crawl like flies out on the face of the rock and, with craning necks and cautious steps, seek new advantage above. They discovered at length the remains of a scrub pine jutting out below the railroad track. The tree had been sawed off almost at the root, when the roadbed was levelled, and a few feet of the trunk was left hugging upward against the granite wall.
Glover, Young, and Dancing consulted a moment. The thing was not impossible; the superintendent was bleeding to death.
Spectators across the gap saw movements they could not quite comprehend. Safety lines were overhauled for the last time, the picks put in the keeping of Morris Blood, who lay flat on the ledge. Glover and Bill Dancing, facing outward, planted themselves side by side against the rocky wall. Smith Young, facing inward, flattened himself in Glover’s arms, passed across him and, pushing his safety-girdle well up under his arms, stood a moment between the two big men. Glover and Dancing, getting their hands through the belt from either side, gripped him, and Young uncoiled from his right hand a rope noosed like a lariat. Steadied by his companions and swinging his arms in a cautious segment on the wall, he tried to hitch the noose over the trunk of the pine.
With the utmost skill and patience, he coaxed the loop up again and again into the air overhead, but the brush of the short branches against the rock defeated every attempt to get a hold.
He rested, passed the rope into his other hand, and with the same collected persistence endeavored to throw it over from the left.
Sweat beaded Bucks’ forehead as he looked. Gertrude’s father, the man of sixty millions, with nerves bedded in ice, crushed an unlighted cigar between his teeth, and tried to steady the glass that shook in his hand. Gertrude, resting one hand on a bowlder against which she steadied herself, neither spoke nor moved. The roadmaster could not land his line.
The two men released him and, with arms spread wide, he slipped over to where Morris Blood lay, took from him the two picks, and cautiously rejoined his comrades. Two of the men reversing their positions, faced the rock wall. They fixed a pick into a cranny between their heads, crouched together, and the third, planting his feet first on their knees and then their shoulders, was raised slowly above them.
The glasses turned from afar caught a sheen of sunshine that spread for an instant across the face of the mountain and sharply outlined the flattened form high on the arête. The figure seemed brought by the dazzling light startlingly near, and those looking could distinguish in his hand a pick, which, with his right arm extended, he slowly swung up and up the face of the rock until he should swing it high to hook through the roots of the pine.
Gertrude asked Bucks who it was that spread himself above his comrades, and he answered, Dancing; but it was Glover.
Deliberately his extended arm rose and fell in the arc he was following, higher and higher, till the pick swung above his head and lodged where he sent it among the pine-tree roots. At the very moment, one of the men supporting him moved—the pick had dislodged a heavy chip of granite; in falling it struck his crouching supporter on the head. The man steadied himself instantly, but the single instant cost the balance of the upmost figure. With a suppressed struggle, heartbreaking half a mile away, the man above strove to right himself. Like light his second hand reached for the pick handle; he could not recover it. The pyramid wavered and Glover, helpless, spread his hands wide.
By an instinct deeper than life, she knew him then, and cried out and out in agony. But the pyramid was dissolving before his eyes, and she saw a strange figure with outstretched arms, a figure she no longer knew, slowly slipping headlong down a blood-red wall that burned itself into her brain.
CHAPTER XXIII
BUSINESS
Cruelly broken and bruised, Young, Bill Dancing, and Glover late that night were brought up in rope cradles by the wrecking derrick and taken into the Brock car, turned by its owner into a hospital. An hour after the fall on the south arête the hill blockade had been broken. With word of the disaster to nerve men already strained to the utmost, effort became superhuman, the impossible was achieved, and the relief train run in on the mine track.
Morris Blood, unconscious, was lifted from the narrow shelf at four o’clock and put under a surgeon’s care in time to save his life. To rig a tackle for a three-hundred-foot lift was another matter; but even while the derrick-car stood idle on the spur waiting for the cable equipment from the mine, a laughing boy of a surgeon from the hospital was lowered with the first of the linemen to the snow-field where the three men roped together had fallen, and surgical aid reached them before sunset.
Last to come up, because he still gave the orders, Glover, cushioned and strapped in the tackle, was lifted out of the blackness of the night into the streaming glare of the headlights. Very carefully he was swung down to the mattresses piled on the track, and, before all th
at looked and waited, a woman knelt and kissed his sunken eyes. Not then did the men, dim in the circle about them, show what they felt, though they knew, to the meanest trackhand, all it meant; not when, after a bare moment of hesitation, Gertrude’s father knelt opposite on the mattress-pile, did they break their silence, though they shrewdly guessed what that meant.
But when Glover pulled together his disordered members and at Gertrude’s side walked without help to the step of the car, the murmur broke into a cheer that rang from Pilot to Glen Tarn.
“It was more than half my fault,” he breathed to her, after his broken arms had been set and the long gash on his head stitched. “I need not have lost my balance if I had kept my head. Gertrude, I may as well admit it—I’m a coward since I’ve begun to love you. I’ve never told you how I saw your face once between the curtains of an empty sleeper. But it came back to me just as Dancing’s shoulder slipped—that’s why I went. I’m done forever with long chances.” And she, silent, tried only to quiet him while the car moved down the gap bearing them from Pilot together.
“Do you know what day to-morrow is?” Gertrude was opening a box of flowers that Solomon had brought from the express-office; Glover, plastered with bandages, was standing before the grate fire in the hotel parlor.
“To-morrow?” he echoed. “Sunday.”
“Sunday! Why do you always guess Sunday when I ask you what day it is?”
