At the foot of the mountains that stretch upward from the Dyea
sands, he dug a grave, four feet. And that night he would bury her.
But his resolution failed him. All night he sat beside the
unreplying dead and stroked her icy hands. “To-morrow I will do it,”
he said. But the next day he dug again in the grave. It should be
six feet. And neither could he say farewell that night.
Then Blanche came over to him. “We leave on Saturday. You know
to-day is Wednesday,” she said, and went away quickly, for she saw
the sheeted form, and understood something of his pain. On Thursday
she came again. Harrison had not been at the restaurant all day, and
she carried a tray with her. The cabin was empty, but a note on the
table said: “I can not give her up. I could not hide her in a grave
of earth. I will lay her on the mountain top above the glacier.
Thank you. Good-by.”
Now the glacier lies in a greater crater of the mountains there,
above the snow line, five thousand feet above Dyea; and behind it
there towers a solitary peak that juts needle-like, head and
shoulders over the lesser crags of the crater. Up above the world,
far from the sound of man, into the great silence it reaches, where
only the northern lights keep the long vigils with its
wind-tormented top.
That night when Blanche asked Billy Matthews, who ought to know,
being a squaw-man and an old-timer there, how long it would take to
go to the glacier, he said the Siwashes called it two days. “And how
long would it take to go to the top of the big peak?” Matthews
smiled. “Why, no one’s ever gone, sis, and I don’t scarcely think
they will.”
But the next day Blanche borrowed the glasses from the trading-post
and watched the snow line. About four o’clock a black speck
gradually emerged at the timber limit, and showed sharply against
the snow-fields that lay beyond. The glasses showed a man with a
long bundle upon his back. Blanche closed them, and watched the
speck with her naked eye. Slowly it crept to the foot of the great
ice rampart, and as it mounted the green precipices, a bank of cloud
engulfed it.
Early next morning Blanche searched the mountain with the glasses.
The speck had crossed the miles of glacier in the night, and was
half way up the mighty pinnacle that lay behind. There it clung to a
precarious hold on the storm-swept crag, its ghastly burden still
upon its shoulders. Five hundred feet below it lay a great
snow-field, hundreds of feet deep. Five hundred feet above it hung
the mountain crest. Blanche could see the wind sweep great banks of
snow around the speck. The footing must have been slippery, for the
speck climbed less than a hundred feet in an hour, and then, as a
wind-gust swept a swirling eddy of sleet across the precipice, it
fell--fell straight to the eternal snows five hundred feet beneath
it, and disappeared. Even with the glasses Blanche could see no hole
in the drift, and besides the wind would fill it full again almost
at once.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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