The moment the track was clear, the private car was backed again down
the ridge. Following the serpentine winding of the right of way, the
general manager was able to run the car far around the mountain, and it
stopped opposite the southern face, which rose across the broad cañon.
When the party in the car got their glasses fixed, the little company
beyond the gulf had begun their climb and were strung like marionettes
up the base of Pilot.
The south face of the mountain, sheer for nearly a thousand feet, is
broken by narrow ledges that make an ascent possible, and not until the
peak passes the timber does snow ordinarily find lodgment upon that
side. Swept by the winds from the Spanish Sinks, the vertical reaches
above the base usually offer no obstruction to a rapid climb, though
except perhaps by early prospectors, the arête had never been scaled.
Glover, however, in locating, had covered every stretch of the mountain
on each of its sides, and Dancing's poles and brackets, like
banderillas stung into the tough hide of a bull, circled Pilot from
face to face. These two men were leading the ascent; below them could
be distinguished the roadmaster and the injured superintendent.
Stripped to the belt and lashed in the party rope, the leader, gaunt
and sinewy, stretched like an earthworm up the face of the
arête--crossing, recrossing, climbing, retreating, his spiked feet
settling warily into fresh holes below, his sensitive hands spreading
like feelers high over the smooth granite for new holds above. Slowly,
always, and with the deliberate reserve that quieted with confidence
the feverish hearts watching across the gulf, the leaders steadily
scaled the height that separated them from the track. Like sailors
patiently warping home, the three men in advance drew and lifted the
fourth, who doughtily helped himself with foot and hand as chance
allowed and watched patiently from below while his comrades disputed
with the sheer wall for a new step above.
Bucks and Callahan, following every move, mapped the situation to their
companions as its features developed. With each triumph on the arête,
bursts of commendation and surprise came from the usually taciturn men
watching the struggle with growing wonder. Bucks, apprehensive of
delays in the track-opening on the hill, sent Callahan back in the car
with instructions to pick a gang of ten men and pack them somewhom
across the snow to the mine spur, that they might be ready to meet the
climbing party and carry the superintendent down to the mine hospital.
Thirty feet below the mine track and as far above where Glover at that
moment was sitting--his rope made fast and his legs hanging over a
ledge, while his companions reached new positions--a granite wall rises
to where the upper face has been blasted away from the roadbed. To the
east, this wall hangs without a break up or down for a hundred feet,
but to the west it roughens and splits away from the main spur, forming
a crevice or chimney from two to three feet wide, opening at the top to
ten feet, where a small bridge carries the track across it. This
chimney had been Dancing's quest from the moment the ascent began, for
he had lost a man in that chimney when stringing the mine wires, and
knew precisely what it was.