The Daughter of a Magnate

by Frank H. Spearman

The move made new dispositions necessary. Orders flew from Bucks like curlews, for it was more essential than ever to open the hill speedily.

The private car was run across the Hog's Back, and the news sent to the rotary crew with injunctions to push with all effort as far at least as the mine switch, that help might be sent out on the spur to meet the party on the climb.

The increased activity apparent far up and down the mountain as the word went round, the bringing up of the last reserve engines for the hill battery, the effort to get into communication by telegraph with the mine hospital and Glen Tarn Springs, the feverish haste of the officials in the car to make the new dispositions, all indicated to Gertrude the approach of a crisis—the imminence of a supreme effort to save one life if the endeavor enlisted the men and resources of the whole division. New gangs of shovellers strung on flat-cars were being pushed forward. Down the hill, spent and disabled engines were returning from the front, and while they took sidings, fresh engines, close-coupled, steamed slowly like leviathans past them up the hill.

The moment the track was clear, the private car was backed again down the ridge. Following the serpentine winding of the right of way, the general manager was able to run the car far around the mountain, and it stopped opposite the southern face, which rose across the broad cañon. When the party in the car got their glasses fixed, the little company beyond the gulf had begun their climb and were strung like marionettes up the base of Pilot.

The south face of the mountain, sheer for nearly a thousand feet, is broken by narrow ledges that make an ascent possible, and not until the peak passes the timber does snow ordinarily find lodgment upon that side. Swept by the winds from the Spanish Sinks, the vertical reaches above the base usually offer no obstruction to a rapid climb, though except perhaps by early prospectors, the arête had never been scaled. Glover, however, in locating, had covered every stretch of the mountain on each of its sides, and Dancing's poles and brackets, like banderillas stung into the tough hide of a bull, circled Pilot from face to face. These two men were leading the ascent; below them could be distinguished the roadmaster and the injured superintendent.

Stripped to the belt and lashed in the party rope, the leader, gaunt and sinewy, stretched like an earthworm up the face of the arête—crossing, recrossing, climbing, retreating, his spiked feet settling warily into fresh holes below, his sensitive hands spreading like feelers high over the smooth granite for new holds above. Slowly, always, and with the deliberate reserve that quieted with confidence the feverish hearts watching across the gulf, the leaders steadily scaled the height that separated them from the track. Like sailors patiently warping home, the three men in advance drew and lifted the fourth, who doughtily helped himself with foot and hand as chance allowed and watched patiently from below while his comrades disputed with the sheer wall for a new step above.

Bucks and Callahan, following every move, mapped the situation to their companions as its features developed. With each triumph on the arête, bursts of commendation and surprise came from the usually taciturn men watching the struggle with growing wonder. Bucks, apprehensive of delays in the track-opening on the hill, sent Callahan back in the car with instructions to pick a gang of ten men and pack them somewhom across the snow to the mine spur, that they might be ready to meet the climbing party and carry the superintendent down to the mine hospital.

Thirty feet below the mine track and as far above where Glover at that moment was sitting—his rope made fast and his legs hanging over a ledge, while his companions reached new positions—a granite wall rises to where the upper face has been blasted away from the roadbed. To the east, this wall hangs without a break up or down for a hundred feet, but to the west it roughens and splits away from the main spur, forming a crevice or chimney from two to three feet wide, opening at the top to ten feet, where a small bridge carries the track across it. This chimney had been Dancing's quest from the moment the ascent began, for he had lost a man in that chimney when stringing the mine wires, and knew precisely what it was.

The chimney once gained, Dancing figured that the last thirty feet should be easy work, and he had made but one miscalculation—when he had descended it to pull up his lineman, it was summer. Without extraordinary difficulty, Glover gained the ledge where the chimney opened and waited for his companions to ascend. When all were up, they rested a few moments on their dizzy perch, and, while Bill Dancing investigated the chimney, Glover took the chance to renew once more Morris Blood's bandages, which, strained by the climbing, caused continual anxiety.

Bucks, with the party in his glass, could see every move. He saw Dancing disappear into the rock while his comrades rested, and made him out, after some delay, reappearing from the cleft. What he could not make out was the word that Dancing brought back; the chimney was a solid mass of ice.