That night when Blanche asked Billy Matthews, who ought to know, being a squaw-man and an old-timer there, how long it would take to go to the glacier, he said the Siwashes called it two days. “And how long would it take to go to the top of the big peak?” Matthews smiled. “Why, no one’s ever gone, sis, and I don’t scarcely think they will.”
But the next day Blanche borrowed the glasses from the trading-post and watched the snow line. About four o’clock a black speck gradually emerged at the timber limit, and showed sharply against the snow-fields that lay beyond. The glasses showed a man with a long bundle upon his back. Blanche closed them, and watched the speck with her naked eye. Slowly it crept to the foot of the great ice rampart, and as it mounted the green precipices, a bank of cloud engulfed it.
Early next morning Blanche searched the mountain with the glasses. The speck had crossed the miles of glacier in the night, and was half way up the mighty pinnacle that lay behind. There it clung to a precarious hold on the storm-swept crag, its ghastly burden still upon its shoulders. Five hundred feet below it lay a great snow-field, hundreds of feet deep. Five hundred feet above it hung the mountain crest. Blanche could see the wind sweep great banks of snow around the speck. The footing must have been slippery, for the speck climbed less than a hundred feet in an hour, and then, as a wind-gust swept a swirling eddy of sleet across the precipice, it fell—fell straight to the eternal snows five hundred feet beneath it, and disappeared. Even with the glasses Blanche could see no hole in the drift, and besides the wind would fill it full again almost at once.
Gray-lipped, she sought out Matthews. “Billy,” she asked him, “how far would a man sink in that snow up there if he fell off the top of the peak?”
“My God, what questions,” said Billy. “How do I know? He’d stay a thousand years, anyway.”
THE JEWELS OF BENDITA
By Gibert Cunyngham Terry
Old Bendito was digging when he found them—“the jewels of Bendita.” He had been ordered by Don Francisco to make a new border around the “Little Lake of the Emperor” (as it is called even to these days), and, grumbling mightily, the old man set lazily to work. Stopping only occasionally to refresh himself with a corn-husk cigarette, Bendito dug away for as much as two hours, when he was joined by his comrade, Andrés, who proceeded to pass the time of day.
“What makest thou, friend? Wherefore dost toil so strenuously with no friend to assist thee, and in the heat of the day?”
“Oh, lazybones! According to that fool, Don Francisco—may the devil fly away with him—I am making a new bordering for the little lake. For why? Only God knows. But these strangers—la Virgen bear witness that—lacking other work, they make a hole in the ground, in order that a poor devil may have to straightway fill it up again!”