Glover, Young, and Dancing consulted a moment. The thing was not
impossible; the superintendent was bleeding to death.
Spectators across the gap saw movements they could not quite
comprehend. Safety lines were overhauled for the last time, the picks
put in the keeping of Morris Blood, who lay flat on the ledge. Glover
and Bill Dancing, facing outward, planted themselves side by side
against the rocky wall. Smith Young, facing inward, flattened himself
in Glover's arms, passed across him and, pushing his safety-girdle well
up under his arms, stood a moment between the two big men. Glover and
Dancing, getting their hands through the belt from either side, gripped
him, and Young uncoiled from his right hand a rope noosed like a
lariat. Steadied by his companions and swinging his arms in a cautious
segment on the wall, he tried to hitch the noose over the trunk of the
pine.
With the utmost skill and patience, he coaxed the loop up again and
again into the air overhead, but the brush of the short branches
against the rock defeated every attempt to get a hold.
He rested, passed the rope into his other hand, and with the same
collected persistence endeavored to throw it over from the left.
Sweat beaded Bucks' forehead as he looked. Gertrude's father, the man
of sixty millions, with nerves bedded in ice, crushed an unlighted
cigar between his teeth, and tried to steady the glass that shook in
his hand. Gertrude, resting one hand on a bowlder against which she
steadied herself, neither spoke nor moved. The roadmaster could not
land his line.
The two men released him and, with arms spread wide, he slipped over to
where Morris Blood lay, took from him the two picks, and cautiously
rejoined his comrades. Two of the men reversing their positions, faced
the rock wall. They fixed a pick into a cranny between their heads,
crouched together, and the third, planting his feet first on their
knees and then their shoulders, was raised slowly above them.
The glasses turned from afar caught a sheen of sunshine that spread for
an instant across the face of the mountain and sharply outlined the
flattened form high on the arête. The figure seemed brought by the
dazzling light startlingly near, and those looking could distinguish in
his hand a pick, which, with his right arm extended, he slowly swung up
and up the face of the rock until he should swing it high to hook
through the roots of the pine.
Gertrude asked Bucks who it was that spread himself above his comrades,
and he answered, Dancing; but it was Glover.
Deliberately his extended arm rose and fell in the arc he was
following, higher and higher, till the pick swung above his head and
lodged where he sent it among the pine-tree roots. At the very moment,
one of the men supporting him moved--the pick had dislodged a heavy
chip of granite; in falling it struck his crouching supporter on the
head. The man steadied himself instantly, but the single instant cost
the balance of the upmost figure. With a suppressed struggle,
heartbreaking half a mile away, the man above strove to right himself.
Like light his second hand reached for the pick handle; he could not
recover it. The pyramid wavered and Glover, helpless, spread his hands
wide.