“He can climb like a monkey,” said Clay, doubtfully, “and for all he acts so reckless sometimes he’s got a pretty cool head when he really gets into a tight place. If you don’t want a long climb, don’t try to follow him, for he will not stop at a hundred feet unless that mountain’s so slippery that a fly can’t cling to the side of it.”
“Then he’ll find me right beside him,” said the Kid confidently, as he wound the rope around his waist and hastened after Alex, who was already at the mountain’s base.
Alex was going about his undertaking cautiously, for he knew he would be subjected to ridicule by his companions if he failed at the very start. He skirted the mountain’s base watching for a likely place to make a start, but finding only bare, smooth, almost perpendicular walls extending upward some fifty or seventy-five feet. Up beyond this smooth base he could see many knobs and little ledges sticking out which promised fair climbing once the intervening space was overcome. It was not until he had nearly reached the little cabin in the cove, that he came upon that for which he was searching, a place where the smooth wall had crumbled down into the sea, leaving in its wake an incline that seemed to offer a chance to reach the easier climbing above. Up the slight incline Alex scrambled like a monkey with the Kid close at his heels. When about five hundred feet up he stopped and sat down to blow and rest a bit.
“Say, don’t this look like queer mountain climbing to you?” he demanded of the Kid, resting beside him.
“How so, in what way?” the Kid inquired.
“It’s just like going upstairs,” explained Alex. “There’s holes just in the very spots where you want to put your hands or feet. Funny, isn’t it?”
The Kid stood up on the ledge and peered up at the holes above him. “Whew,” he whistled. “They haven’t just happened there; why, boy, most of them have been made by a pick axe.”
“I know it,” said Alex, his face aglow. “Kid, I believe we’re on the trail of that treasure.”
CHAPTER XXIV
GOOD-BYE