“It is not the grade,” remarked the Professor, quietly, “as perhaps you will learn. I am sorry for the mules, too; but it is better to risk them than something more important.”
“Why, you speak as though there were some danger about it!” said the younger man, who was now striding sturdily along, leaving his animal to follow. Many a time he had climbed Pike’s Peak and its brother giants of Colorado, and once had stood on the cone of Popocatépetl. A peak was nothing to him; and as for this excellent path—pooh! It was mere child’s play.
The Professor watched him without a word, but with an expression half quizzical, half grave. After a hundred yards he spoke:
“You don’t seem quite so springy, Barton. I never saw you heavy-footed before.”
“Well, the truth is, Professor,” gasped Barton, rather shamefacedly, “I feel most remarkably queer. My knees ache as they never did before—though I wouldn’t mind that so much. But I cannot seem to breathe well. Here my heart and lungs are pounding away, as if I’d been sprinting for the 220-yard record! It’s enough to make a man ashamed of himself.”
“No cause at all for shame, my dear boy; you are simply learning what everyone has to learn who tempts great altitudes. Now get on your mule.”
“No, I’ll wear this thing off!” cried the athlete, impatiently. “I’m no puny boy, to give up just because I feel a little wrong. I’ll just keep at it, and beat it yet!”
“Barton,” said the older man, in a tone his companion had never heard him use before, “you get on that mule, and let us have no more nonsense. I like your pluck; and it is because you have more real ‘sand’ (as they say in our West) than any young man I know, that I picked you out for this journey. But courage is a dangerous thing unless you mix it with brains. You must learn that there are some things pluck cannot overcome—and this is one of them. Mount, then!”
Barton obeyed with rather an ill grace, and promptly got angrier with himself at realizing what a relief it was to be perched again in the ridiculously comfortable Peruvian saddle. He could not get over a feeling of shame that the muscles which had borne the cruelest tests of the frontier should now have “played the baby,” as he put it; and he rode on somewhat sulkily.