At the top of the shale they paused, while Mills and Tom consulted. This great limestone rock was not such a hard proposition as parts of the Iceberg Lake cliff, and after a careful survey of the ground, they decided the best way to handle six people on the rope was to send a leader up with the end, to anchor where he could find strong anchorage, and then let the rest use it as a rail, rather than fastening it around each person’s waist.
Tom went in number one position, with the Ranger as number two, and Joe was stationed at the bottom, to brace and throw a loop around anybody who might, by chance, slip. In many places, Mills played Tom out nearly the whole length of the rope, where the incline was sufficiently off the perpendicular, and the rest had almost a hundred feet of rope rail to climb by. In only a few places was there real vertical climbing, and those as the summit was neared. Before noon they were all over the last pitch, on the summit.
Robert Crimmins ran to the outer edge of this summit at once, and looked out over the vast green prairie, stretching mile on endless mile to the east, like waves of the sea, and shouted.
“Father, come here!” he called. “Say, this is just like riding on the bowsprit of a tremendous ship!”
Everybody hurried over, to feel the same sensation, all except Joe. “I tell you what it feels like to me,” he said. “It feels as if I was on the front edge of the earth crust when it rode up and over the other edge. This must be the very end of the overthrust.”
“That’s so,” Mr. Crimmins agreed. “I’ve been reading up on this geological formation. This cliff under us—it must be three thousand feet down to the shale slide—was the front edge of the overthrust. You can see that. The Belly River has carved away one side, Kennedy Creek the other, but this old lump of limestone has resisted all the bombardments of frost and water, glacier and storm, and the weather has carved it into a watch-tower of the prairies, an outpost sentinel of the Great Divide.”
[“Some speech!” Tom whispered to Joe.]
But Joe did not laugh. He felt exactly what Mr. Crimmins meant, and it was very thrilling. It seemed as if he could see exactly what happened myriads of years ago when the earth cracked, and one edge of the great crust was shoved forward on to the prairie, and as if he could see what had happened since, to carve the crust into peaks and valleys.
Mills, meanwhile, had been walking about. Now he called to them, and they all went over where he stood, and saw him pointing to the bleached skull of a large animal on the ground.