"There"s old Chief," he said.
Everybody looked. About twelve miles to the northwest, thrust out eastward far from the Divide and with the wall which rose out of the prairie growing steeper and steeper till the last two thousand feet were sheer precipice, stood a magnificent tower of a mountain, shining whitish in the sun as if it were composed of limestone. At the back, it seemed connected by a spine with the range behind, but to the prairie it presented an unbroken front, like some great Gibraltar of a tower, with the prairie gra.s.s and forest beating like surf at its feet. All alone it seemed to stand, like a sentinel of the range behind, a lone outpost.
"Is _that_ what we"ve got to climb?" the three men exclaimed, in one breath.
"Well, we won"t take you up the east wall," Mills laughed.
"Oh, couldn"t we get up it?" Tom cried.
Mills looked at him, and grinned again. "About to-night you won"t feel like climbing _anything_," he said. "Remember, you"re not saddle-broke, the way Joe is."
They now turned north, away from the motor road, ate some lunch under the shade of an aspen and willow thicket, amid the Persian carpet of prairie wild flowers, and then all the afternoon pushed on toward the great limestone tower, with the whole pile of the Rocky Mountain chain beside them for company. Late in the day they reached a rushing stream, which came down from a canon just south of the big mountain. This was the north fork of Kennedy Creek, and they turned up it by a trail, the lowering cliffs of Chief now rearing up almost over their heads, and went into the mouth of the valley, and up till the main tower of Chief was east of them, and they were under the south wall of the spine which connected the peak with the main range behind. Here they made camp, in a little meadow beside the stream, with pine woods all about, and while Tom and the Ranger pitched the tents, with Robert Crimmins giving enthusiastic help, Joe built his fire pit and began to get supper. The two older men, who were pretty sore after the thirty mile ride, hobbled about snipping some boughs for their beds.
It was a good supper Joe gave them, however, and the camp was in as delightful a post as a man could ask, and around the big fire, when the food had all been eaten, the whole party sat or lay on the gra.s.s, in the fine democracy of the open trail, the a.s.sistant Secretaries of State beside the boy scouts from Southmead, and the jokes and stories went around.
But Mills "sounded taps," as he called his bedtime order, very early, as he planned a six o"clock getaway in the morning, and that meant getting up at half-past four. The next day they were to climb Chief. The Ranger looked long at the stars before he came into the tent he and the scouts were using.
"Boys, a good day to-morrow," he said, "but it looks like a storm after that."
"Well, let her rip, after to-morrow," Tom answered. "To-morrow, though, I"m goin" up old Chief, even if I have to climb with nothing but my hands, and I feel now"s if I _would_ have to!"
"Poor old tenderfoot!" Joe laughed.
"Gee, it isn"t my foot," said Tom, so comically that Joe and the Ranger roared with mirth, as they rolled up in their blankets.
CHAPTER XXI--The Climb Up the Tower of Chief Mountain, the Indian Relic on the Summit and An Eagle"s Nest
How Mills managed to wake up just at the time he wanted to, without any alarm clock, the scouts never were able to fathom, but he always could.
He was awake and shaking them at four-thirty the next day. Joe was up on the instant, and putting on his outer clothes, but Tom groaned when he tried to move, and fell back into his blankets with an "Ouch!"
"Your sick friend strikes me as better than you are," Mills taunted him.
"Why wouldn"t he be? He"s been weeks in the saddle now," Tom retorted, stung into sitting up. "I"ll be all right by to-morrow--you see if I"m not."
"Well, I"m sorry you"re too lame to climb Chief to-day," Mills said, with a wink at Joe.
That brought Tom out of his blankets entirely, and on to his feet. "Too lame, your grandmother!" he cried. "I"d like to see you get my rope without me!"
"Oh, it"s been climbed without a rope, many a time," Mills laughed.
Tom was up now, and thoroughly awake, and began to see the joke. He grinned rather sheepishly, and went out of the tent with his towel.
Meanwhile, Joe beat reveille on a frying-pan, and lit his fire.
By six o"clock breakfast was eaten, the horses packed again, and the party on its way. They went up the trail but a short distance, and then turned sharp to the north, and began at once to climb the long spine which connects Chief Mountain with the main range to the west. It was a little over a mile to the summit of this spine, rising from 6,000 feet to 7,400. A horse does not trot up such a grade, but neither does he have to climb like a goat. In an hour, they were at the summit, and could look at last not only eastward, along the ridge, to the limestone tower of Chief which was their goal, but down the slope on the north side to the valley of the Belly River, and across it to the eastern shoulders of Cleveland, the highest mountain in the Park, 10,438 feet.
Here, in the open, gra.s.sy ridges at timber-line, the horses were unsaddled and unpacked, so if they lay down to roll, they could do no damage, and the party, with Tom"s rope and the cameras, set out along the ridge due east toward the towering cliff of Chief, which looked like a huge castle battlement, or watch-tower. It was not over a two-mile walk to the shale pile at the base of the summit precipice, by an easy grade, though the going was sometimes rough. The topographical map Joe carried showed that they rose from 7,400 feet to over 8,000, at the top of the shale pile, and as the mountain is 9,056 feet high, that left about a thousand feet of cliff for the final ascent.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Chief Mt.--the Sentinel of the Prairies]
At the top of the shale they paused, while Mills and Tom consulted. This great limestone rock was not such a hard proposition as parts of the Iceberg Lake cliff, and after a careful survey of the ground, they decided the best way to handle six people on the rope was to send a leader up with the end, to anchor where he could find strong anchorage, and then let the rest use it as a rail, rather than fastening it around each person"s waist.
Tom went in number one position, with the Ranger as number two, and Joe was stationed at the bottom, to brace and throw a loop around anybody who might, by chance, slip. In many places, Mills played Tom out nearly the whole length of the rope, where the incline was sufficiently off the perpendicular, and the rest had almost a hundred feet of rope rail to climb by. In only a few places was there real vertical climbing, and those as the summit was neared. Before noon they were all over the last pitch, on the summit.
Robert Crimmins ran to the outer edge of this summit at once, and looked out over the vast green prairie, stretching mile on endless mile to the east, like waves of the sea, and shouted.
"Father, come here!" he called. "Say, this is just like riding on the bowsprit of a tremendous ship!"
Everybody hurried over, to feel the same sensation, all except Joe. "I tell you what it feels like to me," he said. "It feels as if I was on the front edge of the earth crust when it rode up and over the other edge. This must be the very end of the overthrust."
"That"s so," Mr. Crimmins agreed. "I"ve been reading up on this geological formation. This cliff under us--it must be three thousand feet down to the shale slide--was the front edge of the overthrust. You can see that. The Belly River has carved away one side, Kennedy Creek the other, but this old lump of limestone has resisted all the bombardments of frost and water, glacier and storm, and the weather has carved it into a watch-tower of the prairies, an outpost sentinel of the Great Divide."
["Some speech!" Tom whispered to Joe.]
But Joe did not laugh. He felt exactly what Mr. Crimmins meant, and it was very thrilling. It seemed as if he could see exactly what happened myriads of years ago when the earth cracked, and one edge of the great crust was shoved forward on to the prairie, and as if he could see what had happened since, to carve the crust into peaks and valleys.
Mills, meanwhile, had been walking about. Now he called to them, and they all went over where he stood, and saw him pointing to the bleached skull of a large animal on the ground.
"What"s that?" the men asked.
"Buffalo," he answered.
"How on earth did it get up here?" said Mr. Crimmins. "There are only three things, without wings, which can climb this cliff, surely,--goats, mountain sheep, and men. You needn"t try to tell me a buffalo could climb up here!"
"Shan"t try," the Ranger answered. "A Blackfoot brought that up."
"What for?" Joe asked.
"To use for a pillow while he was getting his medicine. You know, when an Indian boy gets about the age of you scouts, he has to take a sweat bath (made by putting hot stones in a closed lodge and pouring water on "em) to purify himself, and then he goes off to some wild, lonely place and just waits there, naked, without any food, till he has a vision.
This vision tells him what his special "medicine" is to be, which will bring him good luck. Old Yellow Wolf told me we"d find the skull up here. He knew the brave that brought it up for a pillow. He said the young Indian stayed four days on the summit before he got his "medicine.""
"Say, if I stayed up here four days, naked, I"d need some medicine when I got down!" young Crimmins laughed. "Let"s take the skull for a souvenir."
"Oh, no!" Joe cried, forgetting that he was only a cook and guide for the party. "That would be--be desecration! Let it stay here, where the Indian left it!"
Mr. Crimmins looked at him sharply but kindly. "Joe is right," he said.
"Let it stay here as a record of a race too fast vanishing. I like to think of that naked Indian boy, all alone, climbing this great rock tower and for four whole days sitting up here far above the world, waiting for a vision from his G.o.ds. You wouldn"t catch one of our American boys doing anything like that. Yet we think we are vastly superior to the Indians!"
"But his vision, after all, probably came because he was dizzy for lack of food, and it was a superst.i.tion that it could furnish him a "medicine" to bring good luck," Mr. Taylor said.
"Superst.i.tion or not," the other replied, "it represented the instinct to go out alone, and meditate on solemn things. Didn"t it, Joe?"
"Yes, sir!" Joe answered, his own heart full of enthusiasm for this picture of the lone, naked Indian on top of the watch-tower of the prairies.
But Tom and Robert Crimmins, who had less imagination, had wandered away to an edge of the cliff, to toss stones over into the depths below, and suddenly the rest heard them shouting, and ran to the edge.