“Why wouldn’t he be? He’s been weeks in the saddle now,” Tom retorted, stung into sitting up. “I’ll be all right by to-morrow—you see if I’m not.”
“Well, I’m sorry you’re too lame to climb Chief to-day,” Mills said, with a wink at Joe.
That brought Tom out of his blankets entirely, and on to his feet. “Too lame, your grandmother!” he cried. “I’d like to see you get my rope without me!”
“Oh, it’s been climbed without a rope, many a time,” Mills laughed.
Tom was up now, and thoroughly awake, and began to see the joke. He grinned rather sheepishly, and went out of the tent with his towel. Meanwhile, Joe beat reveille on a frying-pan, and lit his fire.
By six o’clock breakfast was eaten, the horses packed again, and the party on its way. They went up the trail but a short distance, and then turned sharp to the north, and began at once to climb the long spine which connects Chief Mountain with the main range to the west. It was a little over a mile to the summit of this spine, rising from 6,000 feet to 7,400. A horse does not trot up such a grade, but neither does he have to climb like a goat. In an hour, they were at the summit, and could look at last not only eastward, along the ridge, to the limestone tower of Chief which was their goal, but down the slope on the north side to the valley of the Belly River, and across it to the eastern shoulders of Cleveland, the highest mountain in the Park, 10,438 feet.
Here, in the open, grassy ridges at timber-line, the horses were unsaddled and unpacked, so if they lay down to roll, they could do no damage, and the party, with Tom’s rope and the cameras, set out along the ridge due east toward the towering cliff of Chief, which looked like a huge castle battlement, or watch-tower. It was not over a two-mile walk to the shale pile at the base of the summit precipice, by an easy grade, though the going was sometimes rough. The topographical map Joe carried showed that they rose from 7,400 feet to over 8,000, at the top of the shale pile, and as the mountain is 9,056 feet high, that left about a thousand feet of cliff for the final ascent.
Chief Mt.—the Sentinel of the Prairies