Making Leadville only a halting point, they had come on up the railroad to a flag-station hamlet high in the backbone range. By making a few judicious inquiries in the hamlet, Bromley had learned what he wanted to know, and which trail to take. In one of the gulches far above the railroad, the gray, beard-like dump of a mine or prospect tunnel could be seen, with the help of the field-glasses, and it was on the steep trail toward this that he was leading his breathless charges.
“Well wait until you get your breath,” he offered, in answer to Jean’s protest. “There is no hurry. It will be hours before we can get the return train.”
As he spoke, he was sweeping the upper reaches of the trail with the glass. On one of the nearer loopings a man was descending. Bromley readjusted the focus of the binocular and fixed the descending mountaineer fairly in its field. What he saw made him stultify himself immediately and shamelessly.
“If you really don’t care to go any farther, Jean,” he said hastily, “Mysie and I will climb up to that monument rock over there on the other spur. You won’t mind? We’ll be in plain sight nearly all the way.”
“Of course I won’t mind. I could sit here and enjoy this magnificent view all day. Run along.”
Philip Trask, no longer crippled in body, mind or vision, saw the three human dots on the trail below him; saw two of them separate from the third and move away to the left toward a hunched shoulder of the mountain with a curiously shaped pinnacle rock at its summit. “Tenderfoots,” he said to himself, “and one of them is already out of breath.” He looked again, squinting his eyes against the hard light of the forenoon sun. “Humph!—skirts. I wonder who was fool enough to drag a couple of women eleven thousand feet up in the air? No wonder one of them has pegged out.”
A turn in the trail hid the motionless figure at the halting place for the time, though he could still see the others making their toilful way onward and upward over the rock-strewn talus. As he drew nearer to the one who had been left behind, the rock, upon one of the lower shelf-like ledges of which she was sitting, kept him from getting a fair sight of her, and it was not until he was about to go on past her that he saw who she was and stopped short.
“Jean!” he gasped.
She stood up and held out both hands to him, and what she said appeared to take no account of anything that had intervened, save the lapse of time.
“You, Philip? I wonder if I’m dreaming? Is it really you—after all these months? Where did you come from?”