“Never mind,” said Spider, “you’ve done your good turn for today. You’ve given him to that kid.”
“Yes, I have!” said the honest Bennie. “He did the good turn, I’ll say. He gave himself to the kid. A lot I had to do with it!”
They picked up the Stone car at the garage again, and set off at last for Portland, down the Columbia Highway, which is one of the finest motor roads in the world. It is laid out beside the great green river, sometimes down on the bank, beside the railroad, sometimes climbing up a thousand feet to the top of the cliffs, sometimes cut out of the sides of the cliffs, sometimes having to go right through a headland of lava by a tunnel. All the way through the Columbia gorge, from The Dalles nearly to Portland, the car rolled along the wide macadam highway, with the green river on one side, and the towering cliffs and waterfalls on the other, or else climbed up and down these cliffs by cleverly engineered grades.
The highest waterfall they passed was Multnomah, which dropped hundreds and hundreds of feet over the cliff, almost on the very road. And near it were several superb basaltic lava pinnacles, towering 2,000 feet above the car.
“Oh, Uncle Billy, haven’t we time to stop and have a try at that one?” Bennie cried, pointing to a great dome-like pinnacle which jutted out from the cliff like the tower at the front of a church.
“That’s St. Peter’s Dome,” his uncle said. “We wouldn’t have time to climb that if we had a year. Nobody has ever succeeded in getting up it.”
“Why not?”
“Because a couple of hundred feet or so below the top, it is not only perpendicular all around, but the wall overhangs a shade. Nobody can climb an overhung precipice. I suppose we could carry up a coast guard mortar, and shoot a rope over the top, and then hoist you up in a breeches buoy, maybe. But I’m afraid there won’t be time to do that today.”
“You folks out here have it pretty soft, I’ll say,” Bennie commented.
“How’s that?”