“The ‘ayes’ have it,” the doctor laughed. “Well, Norman, we’ll take up a tent and bedding right after lunch. We’ll sleep at timber line tonight, and again tomorrow night. Have two horses sent up day after tomorrow morning, at daybreak, to get the stuff, and have the rest of the train packed and waiting at the head of the cove. We’ll make our getaway over the head wall by seven or eight o’clock. I’m going to try to get out by the short trail, day after tomorrow, snow or no snow.”
Everybody lay around all that morning, in the shade of the woods, resting. After lunch, the largest tent, some grub, the sleeping bags, and a few cooking utensils were packed on two horses, while the climbers toted their climbing boots (now dried and oiled again), and a change of clothes in their packs. Nothing else was taken except the necessary climbing equipment—not even cameras. Dumplin’ went along to spend the night with them, and have supper ready for them when they got down the next evening. He was pretty blue at the idea of being left behind, and kept saying, “I bet I could do it this time, and not get dizzy.” But his father and the doctor wouldn’t say he could go.
They got the tent pitched as near timber line as they could find a level, dry spot, and spent the latter part of the afternoon gathering fuel and melting snow for water. The two horses, of course, had been taken back down the slope by the guide. The six of them were alone, in the chill silence at the edge of the eternal snows, with the mountain rising right above them, white and naked, to the glittering pinnacle. While supper was cooking, Bennie and Spider walked up a few hundred feet on the lower snow-field, glanced back at the tumbled wilderness of forest and mountain and cañon, stretching south to the white pyramids of the Three Sisters, and then looked long upward at the pinnacle, pink with sunset.
“Gosh!” Bennie exclaimed, “what a lot of wild country! Do you realize, Spider, that we haven’t met a human being since we left Marion Lake?”
“You forget the chap in the aeroplane,” Spider laughed. “Well, we came out here to see the wilderness, didn’t we?”
“You bet we did! And tomorrow we’re going to tackle old Jefferson again. You know, I feel just as if it was a kind of fight. I bet other mountaineers feel that way, too. That’s why it’s such fun.”
“Other mountaineers is good,” Spider replied. “You talk as if you were a Swiss Guide.”
“Well, I feel as if I could be one, when we get through with this old ant-hill,” Bennie laughed. “I bet that pinnacle is going to be a sockdologer!”
Spider’s face was sober. “I’m kind of scared of it, I don’t mind admitting. I don’t blame poor old Dump a bit for getting dizzy. I don’t get dizzy, but when I think how easy it would be to slip, I kind of get hollow in the pit of my stomach.”
Bennie was about to answer, when he heard a bark down the slope, and looking back saw Jeff bounding up the snow! The pup had broken loose back at the camp (or the cook had let him loose), and he had followed the tracks up here. He fell upon Bennie with yelps of joy.