"Joe, can you have breakfast ready then?"
"Yes, sir."
"Mills, will you breakfast with us?"
"Thanks--I sure will if Joe makes the coffee."
"Then it"s settled. Now, Tom, you can go to bed as early as you like.
I"m going to turn in right away."
("Sounds like a hint!") Joe whispered.
Tom nodded. He saw that the camp was all right, bade the doctor good-night, and with Joe and Mills walked up the path toward their camp.
"Well, Joe," Mills said, "they"re keeping you busy, eh? Sorry you can"t come along to-morrow--we might find a hole somewhere for you to fall into."
"I"ll let Spider do a few flipflaps now," said Joe. "I"ve had my turn."
"If anybody tumbles, I hope it"s the M. D.," Tom laughed. "He"s just a little bit fond of Dr. Kent,--strikes me."
"Sh! You forget he"s climbed the Matterhorn," said Mills.
He went on to his cabin, and the boys settled down in their own tent.
"Well, old Joey, here you are home!" Tom cried, giving him a slap. "Gee, wifey, it"s been lonely for a whole week without you!"
"And it"s some nice to get back," said Joe. "It sure seems like home, this little old tent, and Mr. Rogers" little old cot. Slept on the floor last night, and on the ground all the other nights. Oh, you cot!"
He sank luxuriously down, wrapped in his blankets, and let Tom blow out the lantern.
"Home!" he sighed, sleepily. "Just a little old tent, but home--with old Spider snoring in the other bunk."
"I don"t snore!" Tom retorted. "It"s you who snore."
"You may if you want to," said Joe. "It would take more"n a snore to keep me awake to-night. Oh, you cot! "Night, Spider."
""Night, Joe."
If either of them snored, no one knew it, except the porcupine that came sniffing around the tent, and then, disappointed, went off through the forest.
CHAPTER XVI--Tom Goes Up a Two Thousand Foot Wall, With an Alpine Rope, and Learns the Proper Way To Climb
The scouts were up again before five, and hurried to the camp, where the doctor was still sound asleep.
"Sound is right!" Spider laughed.
But he woke when he heard them getting breakfast, and by the time he was dressed and breakfast was ready, Mills came up, followed by Popgun and the packhorse, both saddled.
As soon as breakfast was over, the two men and Tom stowed away in their pockets the sandwiches Joe made for them, made sure that all the spikes were in their boots, and swung into the saddle.
"Good-bye, old Joey," Tom called. "Have some good hot dinner ready when we get back."
"Yes, and you come back with your neck whole, to eat it," said Joe, waving his hand and watching the three riders trot up the trail in the cool, level, early morning sunlight.
It was a fine, clear day, a real Rocky Mountain day, when you could almost see the b.u.t.tons on a man"s coat a quarter of a mile away. And it was Tom"s first trip away from Many Glacier, into the high places, though he had walked around the camp as far as he dared, and even climbed a little way up a steep shale pile at the base of the cliff behind the chalets. However, hikers were apt to show up at any time of the day, and he had never been able to venture more than a mile or two.
But now he was bound for Iceberg Lake, and then up the very main precipice of the Great Divide, the backbone of the continent, with the Park Ranger and a man who had climbed the Matterhorn!
It was only a short ride to Iceberg Lake--about six miles. The trail was a fine one, of easy grade, and for some distance wound through the woods, over tumbling brooks, and through beds of wild flowers. The doctor seemed as much interested in these flowers as he was in the coming climb.
"I never saw such a profusion," he kept saying. "So many kinds all together, and such beautiful ma.s.ses of color. Well, well, how little we Americans know about our own country. Tom, I want you to go back East and tell your schoolmates this is a pretty fine land we live in."
"You bet I will--if I go back," said Tom. "I like it so much here I may stay forever, and be a ranger, like Mr. Mills."
"After one winter, you won"t like it so much," Mills said.
Gradually the trail climbed above the tall timber, and the view opened out. Tom could see they were headed for a big semicircular amphitheatre, cut into the towering rock walls of the Divide, and before long they entered the open end of this t.i.tanic stadium. It was a wild, beautiful spot. At their feet was a meadow, covered with yellow dog-tooth violets like gold patterns in a green carpet, and with little pines in it like people walking about. On three sides of them, sweeping around in a semicircle at the end, was a vast precipice, seemingly perpendicular, except for the big shale piles at the base. The top of this cliff was a "castellated ridge," the term mountaineers give to a summit which is long and level, but broken into little depressions and towers, like the battlements of an ancient castle. At the upper end of the amphitheatre lay a round lake, about half a mile across, and at the upper end of that, right under the shadow of the head wall, was the glacier.
This glacier, snow covered on top, showed a thirty foot wall of green ice on the upright edge, and chunks of this ice were constantly breaking off and floating away in the green water. Hence the name Iceberg Lake.
They rode right up to the sh.o.r.e, and Mills took the horses into a little clump of trees, where there was some gra.s.s also, and tethered them.
"Now," said he, coming back, "to the job. There"s the cliff."
He led the way, with long easy strides, around the right hand side of the lake, through steep rough going, without any path and amid stubborn timber-line evergreens, till he reached the base of a huge shale and snowslide that stretched right up at an angle of about fifty degrees, Tom estimated, to the base of the jagged precipice. Looking up this shale slide to the towering cliff above, Tom saw the staggering task ahead of them--and his heart went down into his spiked boots for a minute. He could see how they could get up part way, all right, for at first it wasn"t quite perpendicular, and it was full of ledges. But then there seemed to be a sheer rise, with not even a toe hold--"and if you fell--good-night!" he whispered to himself.
But Mills and Dr. Kent were studying the cliff quite calmly.
"I"ve seen the goats come down to that snow-field at the top of this shale, half a dozen times," the Ranger was saying, "and go back the same way. If we can find their trail, I guess we can make it, though they"ll use an awful narrow ledge sometimes. They get into one or the other of those two big gullies, too, on the way back."
"There seems to be ample footing," the doctor remarked.
There did not seem to be any footing to poor Tom, but he did not say so.
If they were going up, he was! But those two thousand feet of rock didn"t look much like the three hundred foot slope the scouts used to climb back in Southmead. It was the Great Divide in a single jump, and Tom felt about as small as a fly must feel on the side of the Washington Monument--and a good deal more helpless, because the fly has suckers on his feet, and wings beside.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Iceberg Lake and Glacier]
Mills now led the way up the shale pile, just a smooth, insecure slide of sharp, broken stone, mostly in small, irregular, flat pieces something like rotten slate. It wasn"t as slippery as a pile of coal would be, of course, but there was a good deal of tiresome back-slide under one"s feet, none the less.
Close to the top was a snow-field, and Mills examined it.
"They"ve been here--within a day," he announced, pointing to fresh hoof tracks, and also pointing to spots where the goats had evidently taken bites out of the snow, probably as a dog does when thirsty. Above the snow-field Tom could see just the faintest hint of a trail over the shale, which led up to the base of the solid cliff.
"There she is--this is the way!" the Ranger called.
The three of them now halted directly under the tremendous wall, and looked up. Again Tom"s heart sank. It wasn"t so nearly perpendicular as it looked from the lake below, but he could see stretch after stretch where a climber"s face would be ticklishly close to the spot where he"d got to put his feet next time--and the great, ragged wall, in long, wavy horizontal strata belts, stretched up and up and up and up!