A Volunteer with Pike Part 25

But we did not linger long to gaze at this sublime prospect. Though our thermometer here registered well below zero, we struggled on upward through the waist-deep snow to the first of the summits which rose before us. An hour found us close upon what we took to be the goal of our efforts.

At last, panting from our exertions and the rarity of the air, we floundered up the final rise to the crest. In this wild, scrambling rush Brown dropped to the rear, while the Lieutenant, though physically the least robust of the party, forged ahead even of myself, upborne by his zealous spirit. He, the leader of the expedition, should be--must be--the first to set foot upon the summit of the Grand Peak!

With a final rally of his wiry strength, he uttered a shout and dashed up over the thin, hard-crusted snow of the summit to the crest,--only to stop short and stand staring off beyond, in bitter disappointment.

"Look!" he cried. "The Grand Peak!"

"The Grand Peak!" I shouted back, too excited to perceive the import of his tone and bearing. "The Grand Peak! We'll name it for you,--for the first American to sight it; the first to mount its crest; the first--"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'The Grand Peak!' I shouted. 'We'll name it for you'"]

My exultant cry died away on my lips. I halted and stood gaping in speechless amazement at the peak that loomed skyward over beyond the lesser height we had mounted. What we had taken for the Grand Peak was no more than a satellite that had masked the t.i.tan from our view! As we gazed from our hard-won crest, there uprose before us, grander than ever, the vast bulk of the mighty mountain, its sublime summit glittering with eternal snows. But the nearest ridge of its stupendous pyramidal base was yet a full sixteen miles distant!

I turned and shouted the discovery to Miller and Brown, who toiled up beside us to stare at the awesome beauty of the Peak in dull wonderment.

At last Pike regained his usual firm composure.

"We will begin the return march," he ordered, without betraying a trace of his keen disappointment either in look or voice.

"Send them back," I replied, nodding toward Brown and Miller. "Let us go on and make the attempt alone."

"My thanks to you, John!" he exclaimed. "But it would be madness, sheer madness. Through these snows we could not reach the base of the Peak short of a day's march; and look at that ascent! I doubt if any man could scale those heights."

"Not at this season. Yet, if you give the word to make the attempt--"

"No!" he rejoined. "Without food, and clad as we are in summer wear, no!

It is enough to have ascended this peak, without our being so mad as to attempt the impossible."

"Then the sooner we reach the plain, the better," I said, pointing to the mountain side behind us.

While we had stood viewing the indescribable grandeur and sublimity of the Peak and the snow-clad sierras which stretched away in savage majesty to north and south of their mighty chieftain, the clouds below us were rolling upwards, were enveloping the entire mountain upon which we stood. Fearful of being lost in a snowstorm upon these bleak heights, we descended rapidly down a cleft, and regained our bivouac at the foot of the mountain just as the snow began to fall.

Here we found our blankets and other camp equipment as we had left them.

But the ravens had robbed us of all our food, other than an unstripped fragment of the deer's ribs. Though one of the men had killed a partridge during our descent, the bird and the lean deer bones together formed a scant enough meal for four men who had not eaten in two days.

About noon the next day we shot two buffaloes, upon whose flesh we gorged ourselves like Indians, and I, for one, am convinced that we had well earned the full meal.

In the valley, all up and down the creek, we found many old Comanche camps, but the Indians had undoubtedly gone south for the Winter.

The next day brought us back to our little stockade on the Arkansas.

CHAPTER XVIII

FAMINE AND FROST

Many even of our Western-bred officers would have considered themselves justified in lying about camp for at least a day after such a trip. Not so Pike. Toward noon of the next day, which was the last of November, our entire party marched on up the main stream, in the thick of a heavy snowstorm.

We had at last come to the real hardships of our voyage. Within the week two or three of the men suffered frosted feet. The temperature fell to nearly twenty degrees below zero, so that even I felt the cold keenly through my hunting clothes, while the Lieutenant and the others, clad only in their cotton wear, suffered still more from the stinging frost.

Yet, despite all the troubles and hardships of ourselves and our half-starved horses, we held to our explorations, day after day, killing an occasional buffalo or deer, and gradually working our way into the midst of the mighty mountains, northward and westward behind the Grand Peak, along what we thought to be the Spanish trace. At last we came to a large stream, which, to our astonishment, ran to the northeast. Though against all our previous theories, we were forced to believe that this must be the river La Platte. Ascending the stream in a northwesterly direction, all alike suffering greatly from the cold of these high valleys, we pa.s.sed signs of an immense encampment of Indians. But we saw no more of the Spanish trace, or rather of the Indian trace which we had followed into the mountains, thinking it to be the Spanish.

Turning back upon our own trace some little distance, we crossed over a pa.s.s in the mountains to the southwest, and descending a small stream, came upon what we thought to be the upper waters of the Red River. Here, while our wretched, famished beasts were recruiting themselves upon a favorable bit of pasture land, the Lieutenant marched with a small party to explore upstream. At the same time Baroney and I marched down the river, our mission being to kill game for the others, who were to follow us in a day or two.

It was not, however, until three days later, on Christmas Eve, that our party found itself reunited in one camp. After two days of unsuccessful hunting, Baroney and I had at last killed four buffaloes, and young Sparks had shot four more. In view of the fact that we had all been for two days without food, the meeting brought us great happiness.

Yet I cannot say that Christmas Day, which we spent in camp, smoking and drying our meat, was as merry as it might have been. The contrast with all our previous experiences of that holiday was far too sombre. Some of the men even drew unfavorable comparisons between this and the past year, when they were at the head of the Mississippi. Though then in a still colder climate and among the fierce Chippewas, they had at least enjoyed far better food and shelter. As for our present food, though now for the first time in weeks we had an abundant supply, it was limited to the one item of meat, which we must eat without so much as a pinch of salt. Our summery clothes were rent and tattered; many of our blankets torn up for stockings; our outer footwear reduced to clumsy moccasins of raw buffalo hide.

To these physical privations was added the consciousness of the grim fact that between us and the nearest of our far-distant frontier settlements lay all the mountain wilderness we had traversed, and more than seven hundred miles of desert plains. Yet, taken all in all, we managed to spend the day in fairly good cheer, despite the snow which came whirling down upon us.

On the afternoon of the next day we marched down to where the mountains closed in on the river valley. From here on, each succeeding day until the fifth of January found our way rougher and more difficult. The valley became ever deeper and narrower, so that we had to cross and recross the river repeatedly, our horses frequently falling upon the ice. Even harder upon them were their no less frequent slips among the rocks of the banks.

Much to my relief, I was not required to witness the sufferings of the poor beasts coming down through the worst of that terrible canyon. On New Year's Day Brown and I were sent ahead to hunt. Within the first few hours we had the good fortune to bring down a huge-horned mountain ram.

Leaving this in our path for the others to skin and dress, we struggled on down the ever-narrowing valley all that day and the next without sighting any other game.

On the third of January we found ourselves fighting our way along in the gloomy depths of a cleft that wound and twisted through the very bowels of the mountains. The bottom of this tremendous gorge was almost filled with the foaming, roaring torrent of the river, while on either side the cliffs towered skyward in sheer, precipitous precipices, thousands of feet high. Never before had I seen or heard of such a terrific chasm, and may I never again be caught in its like!

Leaping and slipping over the icy rocks beside the furious rapids and falls, and creeping along the narrow ledges of ice that here and there rimmed the less torrential stretches of the stream, we at last gained a spot where a little ravine ran up through the face of the precipice. We saw that it was impossible for us to descend that gloomy gorge even a few yards farther. The icy waters of the roaring cascades swept the bed of the chasm from wall to wall.

Yet to ascend the side cleft seemed no less beyond our power. The water, running down from above earlier in the season, had coated the rocky surface from top to bottom with an unbroken slide of ice. It seemed outright madness to attempt that dizzy ascent. However, a man never knows what he can do until he has tried. We set to, I with my tomahawk and Brown with his axe, and by cutting footholds, turn about, in the ice of the ravine's bottom, we slowly worked our way up the giddy rise.

Again and again we came near to slipping and so plunging headlong down that gla.s.sy slide. After the first hundred feet, we dared no longer look back below, for fear of being overcome with dizziness. Yet at last we came to easier climbing, and, scaling the side of the ravine, found ourselves safe on the mountain ridge, far above the river and its cavernous gorge.

Here we soon killed a deer, and leaving the greater part of the carca.s.s for our companions, pushed on another day across the mountains. We had at last sighted the prairies from our lofty heights, when, pressed by hunger, I was so ill advised as to eat some of the berries we found hanging to the bushes. As a result I suffered such vertigo that I was compelled to lie quiet in camp. But Brown put in the time very well by killing no less than six deer.

Early in the forenoon of the sixth, as we hastened down out of the mountains, we again came within earshot of the torrential river of the gorge. Drawn by the sound, we scrambled around the point of an out-jutting ridge, and found ourselves on the river bank where it flowed from the gorge. It was not the first time I had stood on that selfsame spot.

"Good G.o.d!" I groaned. "After all our toil, and only this!"

"You may well say it, John," echoed a melancholy voice from beneath the cliff upstream.

"Montgomery!" I cried. "You here?"

He appeared from around a big rock, sad and dejected; but at sight of my companion, instantly a.s.sumed a look of unbending resolve.

"We scattered," he explained, as I grasped his hand. "The others took the horses up out of the gorge by the least difficult of the side ravines. I followed your trace down into the midst of that awesome cleft and up the icy ascent. But I lost the trace on the mountain top, and so came on down here--"

"To find that, after all our toil and privation, it is not the Red River!" I cried.

"Ah, well, it is something to have rounded the headwaters of the Arkansas," he replied. He turned to Brown: "You will find two of your fellows downstream at the old camp. Join them, and see what the three of you can do toward killing meat against the coming of the others."

"Aye, sir!" responded Brown, with ready salute.

He was striding off when I interrupted: "Wait! Montgomery, he has six deer already hung."

"Good! The more the better! Fetch the other lads, Brown, and bring in your game. If you see more deer, do what you can to bring them in too."