'All right, Dick,' replied Snap, 'I've lassoed the rock now, firm and fast. One minute!'
The old man saw the boy hang on to the rope and scramble by its help to the point above mentioned.
'Now, Dick!' he cried, and Dick caught the rope and scrambled up after his companion.
'All easy-going now, like going upstairs,' said Snap; and so indeed it was, for the two were now on the last torn pinnacle of the summit, which was so cracked and riven that a child could have climbed it.
'Poor chap! So that's his story!' exclaimed Wharton ten minutes later, as a great bird, gorged and heavy, rose sullenly from a cup-like hollow in the top of the main peak and slid on silent wings into the deep sky beyond.
Where the bird rose, lay what had been a man, and that not many days ago; but the elements and the fowls of heaven had not left enough of the poor clay to tell whether he was white or red. On closer inspection a grey Tyrolese hat with green riband, and tuft of izzard's hair set in it as a plume, told Snap even his nationality, and a broken pair of spectacles confirmed his guess and almost enabled him to re-clothe those poor bones in his mind's eye with the very flesh of the German professor which once covered them.
The balloon, which was still well inflated, had dragged its anchor amongst these rocks and at last struck a firm hold amongst them, and still, as they reached it, tugged and strained at its mooring with a semblance of life in ghastly contrast to the everlasting peace which had fallen upon its helmsman and master.
'The jerk when that there thing pulled up sudden chucked him out, I guess,' said Dick, pointing at the bones; 'and look here, it's broke his arm in two places, and his thigh. Poor wretch, pity but what he didn't fall clear over the edge anyway!'
'That's not what he thought, Dick,' said Snap, who had picked up a log-book which lay by the dead man's side and bore on its cover of calf-skin more than one mark of the vulture's prying beak. '"Gott sei Dank," he begins—and it looks as if he had written it in his own blood, poor fellow—"thank God," he says, "that I shall have time to write——"'
'Yes, well, never mind that now, pard; I guess we'll have lots of time to read that by-and-by. There ain't much room up here, and I guess we'd better go as near giving this foreigner Christian burial as circumstances will allow; you don't happen to recollect a prayer as will suit, do you now, Snap?'