“Here, give me the book—I’ll show you. It’s a German word, I guess—means spire, maybe—I don’t know. Never studied Dutch—probably wouldn’t know if I had—but anyhow they’re tall, sharp rocky peaks, pretty nearly straight up, in the Alps somewhere, and you climb ’em with your teeth and your toe-nails.”
The two scouts paused in the middle of the sidewalk, while Bennie hunted out a picture of several men, roped together, climbing the precipitous face of one of the Dolomites, and their faces were over the book, looking at the thrilling photograph—when, blam, came a snowball, crashing into Bennie’s side.
He thrust the book into Spider’s hands for safe-keeping, stooped for a handful of snow, and dashed around the corner of the post-office after the vanishing pair of heels.
When he came back he was grinning. “Fresh guy, that Tenderfoot,” he said. “His ma won’t need to wash his face for supper tonight. Come on, let’s go to my house and look at those old pictures some more.”
They were soon curled up on the couch in his father’s library, with the book first on one lap and then on the other. After they had looked twice at every picture, they read aloud to each other parts of the text, especially the most exciting parts they could find, but skipping the descriptions of scenery and the long foreign names. The Welsh names were worse than the German.
What interested them most, however, were the pictures that showed how the rope is used, both in climbing and descending, and the passages about it.
“I wish we had a braided rope!” Spider exclaimed.
“Guess we could get some sort of a rope, all right,” said Bennie. “But where are we going to get the—the spitzes to use it on? Those old mountains make ours look like pimples.”
“Oh, they’re not so bad—they’re something, anyway,” Spider answered. “I bet you’d need a rope to climb the cliffs on Monument Mountain, and maybe, if the snow gets deep, we’d have to cut steps in it to get up to those cliffs. Might try it.”
“Sure, we could try it. But you wouldn’t slide far enough to hurt yourself if you did slip going up to the cliffs, and I bet nobody could climb right up the cliffs themselves.”