After an hour or more he found himself on the first ridge, where for a few yards the ground is level before it rises again. Here he called again, once or twice. Once there came, as he thought, a faint distant whistle, but by no manner of calling could he get it to come again. He started off in the direction from which it seemed to come, calling all the way, but never a voice came out of the darkness. For a couple of hours he doggedly haunted the place, loth to leave it while a chance remained. Then he gave it up, and started once more up the steep slope. He looked at his watch by the light of a match. It was eleven o’clock. He shuddered, but not with the cold, and went on.
Something—who could say what?—told him that he must go higher yet. Once last year, in company with Wisdom, he had been as far as the upper bog, and had wanted to go to the top. But Wisdom had dissuaded him. Now, even in the darkness the ground seemed familiar, and he tramped on up the swampy steep till presently he found himself near the sound of rushing water at the foot of the great ravine.
The stream had grown so strong since the afternoon that to shout against it was more hopeless than ever. Yet Rollitt shouted. Had a voice replied, he felt sure he could have heard it. But none did.
Up the steep ravine he went, finding the going easier than through the spongy swamps below. About half-way up, just where the juniors ten hours ago had decided to turn back, as he looked up, he saw what seemed like clear sky through a frame in the mist. Was it clearing after all? Yes. The higher he got the more the mist broke up into fleeting clouds, which swept aside every few moments and let in a dim glimmer of moonlight on the scene.
At the top of the ravine he shouted again; but all was still. Even the wind was dying down, and the rain fell with a deadened sob at his feet. Three o’clock! Wisdom had told him, the day they had been up there, that the top was only three-quarters of an hour beyond where he stood. Something still cried “Excelsior” within him, and without halting longer than to satisfy himself by another shout, he started on.
How he achieved that tremendous climb he could never say. The clouds had rolled off, and the moonlight lit up the rocks almost like day. Never once did he pull up or flag in his ascent. He even ceased to shout.
Presently there loomed before him, gleaming in the moonlight, the cairn. For the first time in its annals, a Fellsgarth boy had got to the top of Hawk’s Pike.
But, so far from elation at the glory of the achievement, Rollitt uttered a groan of dismay when he looked round and found no one there after all. That he would find Fisher minor there he had never doubted; and now—all this had been time lost.
Without waiting to heed the glorious moonlight prospect over lake and hill, he turned almost savagely, and scrambled down the crags. It was perilous work—more perilous than the scramble up. But Rollitt did not think of danger, and therefore perhaps did not meet it. In half an hour he was down on the bog—and in an hour after, just as a faint break in the east gave warning that the night was gone, he stood bruised and panting at the foot of the gorge on the second ridge.
He was too dispirited to shout now. It had not been given to him after all to rescue his friend. He would have done better if he had never—