"Oh, well, then, that's all right. Seems Jessie thinks you'd be a fine
fellow to have along on this trip. I can't go myself. I hate this
mountain climbing, anyway. Too darned hard work. But it's all right for
young folks. Well, now, what do you say? Want to go? You've earned a
vacation, after sixteen years. There's about eight in Jessie's crowd.
Not counting guides. What do you say? Like to go?"
For a dazed moment Florian stared at him. "Why, yessir. Yes, sir,
I'd--I'd like to go--very much." And he coughed to hide his joy and
terror.
And two weeks later he went.
The thing swept the store like a flame. In an hour everyone knew it from
the shipping-room to the roof-restaurant. Myra saw him the day he left.
She was game, that girl.
"I hope you're going to have a beautiful time, Mr. Sykes."
"Thanks, Myra." He could afford to be lenient with her, poor little
girl.
She ventured a final wretched word or two. "It's--it's wonderful of Mr.
Heath and--Miss Heath--isn't it?" She was rubbing salt into her own
wound and taking a fierce sort of joy in it.
"Wonderful! Say, they're a couple of God's green footstools, that's what
they are!" He was a little mixed, but very much in earnest. "A couple of
God's green footstools." And he went.
He went, and Myra watched him go, and except for a little swelling gulp
in her white throat you'd never have known she'd been hit. He was going
with Jessie Heath. Now, Myra had no illusions about those things. Old
man Heath's wife, now dead, had been a girl with no money and no looks,
and yet he had married her. If Jessie Heath happened to take a fancy to
Florian, why----
Myra's little world stood still, and in it were small voices, far away,
asking for 6-1/2-B; and have you it in brown, and other unimportant
things like that.
Ten minutes after the train had started Florian Sykes knew he shouldn't
have come. He had suspected it before. He kept saying to himself, over
and over: "You've always wanted a mountain trip, and now you're going to
have it. You're a lucky guy, that's what you are. A lucky guy." But in
his heart he knew he was lying.
In the first place, they were all so glib with their altitudes, and
their packs, and their trails, and their horses and their camps. It was
a rather mixed and raggle-taggle group that Miss Jessie Heath had
gathered about her for this expedition to the West. They ranged all the
way from a little fluffy witless golden-haired girl they all called Mud,
for some obscure reason, and who had been Miss Heath's room-mate at
college, surprisingly enough, to a lady of stern and rock-bound
countenance who looked like a stage chaperon made up for the part. She
was Miss Heath's companion in lieu of Mrs. Heath, deceased. In between
there were a couple of men of Florian's age; two youngsters of
twenty-one or two who talked of Harvard and asked Florian what his
university had been; an old girl whose name Florian never did learn; and
two others of Jessie Heath's age and general style. Florian found
himself as bewildered by their talk and views as though they had been
jabbering a foreign language. Every now and then, though, one of them
would turn to him for a bit of technical advice. If it happened to
concern equipment Florian could answer it readily enough. Ten years on
the fifth floor had taught him many things. But if the knowledge sought
happened to be of things geographical or of nature, he floundered,
struggled, sank. And it took them just about half a day to learn this.
The trip out takes four, from New York.
At first they asked him things to see him suffer. But they tired of
that, after a bit. It was too easy. Queerly enough, Jessie Heath,
mountain-wise though she was, believed in him almost to the end. But
that only made the next three weeks the bitterer for Florian Sykes. For
when it came to leaping from peak to peak Jessie turned out to be the
young gazelle. And she liked to have Florian with her. On the trail she
was a mosquito afoot, a jockey ahorseback. A thousand times, in those
three weeks of torture, he would fix his eye on a tree ten feet away, up
the steep trail. And to himself he would say, "I'll struggle, somehow,
as far as that tree, and then die under it." And he would stagger
another ten feet, his heart pounding in the unaccustomed altitude, his
lungs bursting, his lips parted, his breath coming sobbingly, his eyes
starting from his head. Leaping lightly ahead of him, around the bend,
was Jessie, always. She had a way of calling to the laggard--hallooing,
I believe it's supposed to be. And she expected an answer. An answer!
When your lungs were bursting through your chest and your heart was
crowding your tonsils. When he reached her it was always to find her
perched on a seemingly inaccessible rock, demanding that he join her to
admire the view. Before three days had gone by the sound of that halloo
with its breeziness and breath-control and power, made him sick all
over. Sometimes she sang, going up the trail. He could not have croaked
a note if failure to do it had meant instant death. The Harvard hellions
(it is his own term) were indefatigable, simian, pitiless. At nine
thousand feet they aimed at ten. At ten they would have nothing less
than twelve. At twelve thousand they were all for making another drive
for it and having lunch at an altitude of thirteen thousand five
hundred. As he toiled painfully along hundreds of feet behind them,
Florian used to take a hideous pleasure in fancying how, on reaching the
ever-distant top, the Harvard hellions would be missing. And after
searching and hallooing he would peer over the edge (13,500 feet, at the
very least, surely) and there, at the bottom, would discern their
mangled forms, distorted, crushed, and quite, quite dead.
"Yoo-o-o--hoo-oo-oo-oo!" Jessie, up the trail. His rosy dream would
vanish.
He learned why seasoned mountain climbers make nothing of the ascent. He
learned, in bitterness and unshed tears, that it is the descent that
breaks the heart and shatters the already broken frame. That down-climb
with your toes crashing through your boots at every step; with your
knee-brakes refusing to work, your thighs creaking, your joints
spavined. The views were wonderful. But, oh, the price he paid! The air
was intoxicating. But what, he asked himself, was wine to a dead man!
Miserable little cockney that he was he told himself a hundred times a
day that if he ever survived this he'd never look at another view again,
unless from the Woolworth Tower, on a calm day. He thought of New York
as a traveller, dying of thirst in the desert, thinks of the lush green
oasis. New York in July! Dear New York in July, its furs in storage, its
collar unstarched, its coat unbuttoned; even its doormen and chauffeurs
almost human. Would he ever see it again? And then, as if in answer to
his question, there befell an incident so harrowing, so
nerve-shattering, as almost to make a negative answer seem inevitable.
Florian got lost.
It was the third week of the trip. Florian had answered Jessie's eleven
thousandth question about things of which he was quite, quite ignorant.
His brain felt queer and tight, as though something were about to snap.
They were to climb the Peak next day. All that day they had been
approaching it. Florian looked at it. And he hated it. It was like a
colossal forbidding finger pointing upward, upward, taunting him,
menacing him. He wished that some huge cataclysm of nature would occur,
swallowing up this hideous mass of pitiless rock.
Jessie Heath's none too classic nose had peeled long ere this and her
neck was like a choice cut of underdone beefsteak. Florian told himself
that there was something almost indecent about a girl who cared so
little about her skin, and hair, and eyes, and hands. He actually hated
her sturdy legs in their boots or puttees--those tireless, pitiless
legs, always twinkling ahead of him, up the trail.
On the fateful day he was tired. He had often been tired to the point of
desperation during the past three weeks. But this was different. Every
step was torture. Every breath was pain. Jessie was a few hundred feet
up the trail, as always, and hallooing to him every dozen paces. The
Harvard hellions were doing the chamois ahead of her. The rest of the
party were toiling along behind. One guide was just ahead. Another,
leading two horses, bringing up the rear. Suddenly, desperately,
Florian knew he must rest. He would fling himself on a bed of moss by
the side of the trail, in the shade, near a stunted, wind-tortured
timber-line pine, and let the whole procession pass him, and then catch
up with them before they disappeared.
He stepped to the side of the narrow trail, almost indiscernible at this
height, flung himself down with a little groan of relief, and shut his
sun-seared eyes. The voices of the others came to him. There was little
conversation. He heard Jessie's accursed halloo. Then the soft thud of
the pack-horses' hoofs, the creak of the saddles. He must get up and
follow now. In a minute. In a minute. In a m----
He must have slept there for two hours. When he awoke the light had
changed and the air was chill. He sat up, bewildered. He rose. He looked
about, called, hallooed, shouted, did all the futile frenzied things
that a city man does who is lost in the mountains, and, knowing he is
lost, is panic-stricken. The trail, of course! He looked for it, and
there was no trail, to his town-wise eyes. He ran hither and thither,
and back to hither again. He went forward, seemingly, and found himself
back whence he started. He looked for cairns, for tree-blazes, for any
one of the signs of which he had learned in the last three weeks. He
found none. He called again, shrilly. A terror seized him. Terror of
those grim, menacing, towering mountain masses. He ran round and round
and round; darted backward and forward; called; stumbled; fell, and
subsided, beaten.
He had a tiny box of matches with him, but little else. He had found the
trail difficult enough without being pack-burdened. Food? He bethought
himself of a little blue tin box in his coat pocket. He took it out and
looked at it. Its very name struck terror to his heart.
U. S. Emergency Ration. It was printed on the box. Just below that he
made out:
Powdered sugar
Chocolate
Cocoa butter
Malted milk
Egg Albumin
Casein.
Not to be opened except on command of officer.
My God! He had come to this! He looked at it, wide-eyed. He was very
hungry. The ration, in its blue tin, like a box of shaving talcum, had
been handed to each of the party in a chorus of shouting and laughter.
And now it was to save his life. He managed to pry open the box, and ate
some of its contents, slowly. It was not agreeable.
Dusk was coming on. There were mountain lions, he knew that. Those rocks
and crevices were peopled with all sorts of stealthy, snarling,
slinking, four-footed creatures. He would build a fire. They were
afraid of the flames, he had read somewhere, and would not come near.
Perhaps the others would see the light, and come back to find him. Curse
them! Why hadn't they come before now!
It was dusk by the time he had his fire built. He had crouched over it
for a half-hour, blowing it, coaxing it, wheedling it. There were few
twigs or sticks at this height. He was very cold. His heavy sweater was
in the pack on the horse's back. Finally he was rewarded with a feeble
flicker, a tiny tongue of flame. He rose from his knees and passed his
hand over his forehead with a gesture of utter weariness and despair.
And then he stared, transfixed. For on the plateau above him rose a
great shaft of fire. The kind of fire that only Pete, the most expert
among guides, could build. And as he stared there burst out at him from
behind trees, rocks, crevices, a whole horde of imps shrieking with
fiendish laughter.
"Ho, ho," laughed Jessie.
And "Ha, ha!" howled the Harvard hellions.
"Thought you were lost, didn'tcha?"
"Gosh, you looked funny!"
"Your face!----"
Florian stared at them. He did not smile. He went quietly over to his
tiny camp-fire and stamped it out, neatly, as he had been taught to do.
He took his can of emergency ration (not to be opened except on command
of officer) and hurled it far, far down the mountainside. Jessie Heath
laughed, contemptuously. And Florian, looking at her, didn't care.
Didn't care. Didn't care.
The nightmare was over in August. Over, that is, for Florian. The rest
were to do another four weeks of it, farther into the interior. Florian
sickened at the thought of it. When he bade them farewell he was so glad
to be free of them that he almost loved them. When he found himself
actually on the little jerkwater train that was to connect him with the
main line he patted the dusty red plush seat, gratefully, as one would
stroke a faithful beast. When he came into the Grand Central station he
would have stooped and kissed the steps of the marble staircase if his
porter had not been on the point of vanishing with his bags. That night
on reaching home he stayed in the bathtub for an hour, just lying there
in the warm, soothing liquid, only moving to dapple his fingers now and
then as a lazy fish moves a languid fin. God's country! This was it.
"My, it's nice to have you back again, Mr. Sykes," said Mrs. Pet.
"Is your big two-room suite on the next floor vacant?" said Florian,
cryptically.
Mrs. Pet stared a little, wonderingly. "Yes, that's vacant since the
Ostranders left, in July. Why do you ask, Mr. Sykes?"
"Nothing," Florian answered, airily. "Not a thing. Just asked."
His train had come in at nine. It was eleven now, but he was restless,
and a little hungry, and very much exhilarated. "You certainly look
grand," Mrs. Pet had exclaimed, admiringly. "And my, how you're
sunburned!"
He left the Lexington Avenue house, now, and strolled over to the
near-by white-tiled restaurant. There, in the window, was the
white-capped one, flapping pancakes. Florian could have kissed him. He
sat down. A waitress approached him.
"I don't know," mused Florian. "I'm sort of hungry, but I don't
just----"
"The pork and beans are elegant to-night," suggested the girl.
And "Pork and beans! NO!" thundered Florian.