And the next moment we shot across the stream, which went racing and growling over its boulders, the pale chocolate hue of its water advertising its glacial origin.
"Up about two thousand four hundred feet now," Milton added. "Longmire Springs next. I say, Bill, I wonder where we shall be this time tomorrow, eh?"
"Goodness knows. Sometimes I find myself wondering if the whole thing isn't pure moonshine, a dream. An angel and a demon on the slopes of Mount Rainier! And they say that this is the Twentieth Century!"
Rhodes smiled wanly.
"I think that you will find the thing real enough, Billy, me lad," said he.
"Too real, maybe. The fact is that I don't know what on earth to think."
"The only thing to do is to wait, Bill. And we won't have to wait long, either."
When we swung to the grade out of Longmire, I thought that we were at last beginning the real climb to the mountain. But Milton said no.
"When we reach the Van Trump auto park, then we'll start up," said he.
And we did—the road turning and twisting up a forest-clad steep. Then, its sinuosities behind us, it ran along in a comparatively straight line, ascending all the time, to Christine Falls and to the crossing of the Nisqually, the latter just below the end of the glacier—snout, as they call it. Yes, there it was, the great wall of ice, four or five hundred feet in height, looking, however, what with the earth and boulders ground into it, more like a mass of rock than like ice. There it was, the first glacier I ever had seen, the first living glacier, indeed, ever discovered in all these United States—at any rate, the first one ever reported. Elevation four thousand feet.