“Here, quick!” he yelled at her companion. “Take her other arm.”
The two of them got Rob’s blanket unrolled and wrapped about her, as best they could for the whipping of the gale, and then half carried her along, while she tried bravely to stop her hysterical sobbing.
The gale was now a perfect fury. It must have been blowing seventy miles an hour, and the contact of this north wind with the warmer cloud bank from the south was making a perfect hurricane vortex of half frozen vapor around these high summits. Everybody was exhausted with fighting against it, and chilled with cold. Mr. Rogers and Art, however, kept shouting back encouragement as each fresh cairn was picked up, and as Mr. Rogers knew the trail, and they had a map and compass, there were only a few delays while he or Art prospected ahead at blind spots. Alternately lying on their faces on the frozen, wet rocks to get their breaths, and pushing on into the gale, they struggled ahead for what seemed hours. Actually it was only half an hour. Half an hour to go 440 yards!
Suddenly, out of the vapor, not twenty-five feet ahead of them, loomed a small, gray shanty.
“Hoorah!” cried Art and Mr. Rogers. “The hut!”
CHAPTER XI
To the Summit, Safe at Last
They dashed to it, and opened the door. The hut was a tiny affair, with a lean-to roof. It faced to the south, with a door so narrow a stout person could barely squeeze in, and one tiny window. It would hold about six people without undue crowding—and here were eight!
“Peanut’s only half a one,” said Art, cracking the first joke since the storm began.
Into the hut, however, all eight of them crowded. Inside, they found two or three blankets hung on a string, and nothing else except a sign forbidding its use in any save cases of emergency.