Andrew placed his foot in a hole he had made, but the snow broke as he rested on it, and he slipped down several yards before the stick brought him up. He shuddered as he glanced below, for it struck him that had he slid a little farther he would not have stopped until he reached the bottom.
"This is an abominable slope," he exclaimed. "I've been on worse in Switzerland, but I had an ice-ax and wasn't half starved then. However, we'll have another try."
He got up twenty yards, clawing at the snow, and then stopped for breath, glancing ruefully at his mittens, which showed signs of wearing through.
"It means frost-bitten hands if these things give out, and they won't stand much more," he said. "The worst of it is that you think we'll find we have wasted our labor when we get to the top. I believe I could feel cheerful if I could see Mappin crawling up after us."
"Mappin has more sense. He stays in his office, which is how money is made. You don't, as a rule, get much for doing this kind of thing. Still, he has to take some chances, and one he didn't size up right is going back on him. When I'm feeling tired and hungry I like to think of my meeting with that man."
"When you're feeling tired and hungry!" Andrew exclaimed. "I feel both all the time!"
"Well," returned Carnally, "what can you expect? If you will make trouble instead of letting things alone, you must take the consequences. Now, if you had been a sensible man and not worried about shareholders you have never seen, you might have been sitting down to your lunch at home. Think of it! A nice warm room, a butler, or somebody of the kind, bringing you a menu as long as your hand. Put you there right now, and you'd take the whole lot. Say, what do you have as a rule?"
"Stop!" said Andrew. "It won't bear thinking of! I know what I'll get for supper, and that's an inch or two of flinty bannock, burned black outside."
It was surface jesting and forced upon them, because they would not face the tragic possibilities of the situation before it was necessary. It was easier to do what could be done with a laugh. Still, they had not laughed much lately, until the imminence of disaster braced them to it.
Changing places now and then to relieve the leader of the work of breaking footholds, they reached the summit, and Andrew's heart sank as he gazed at the landscape which stretched away before him. The air was clear, bright sunshine glittered on the high rocks, but the snow in the shadow was steeped in ethereal blue; dark spruces broke the gleaming surface with a delicate intricacy of outline. The scene had a wild grandeur, but from Andrew's point of view it was inexpressibly discouraging. They had laboriously scaled the first and largest rampart, but beyond it lay a series of lower ridges with rugged and almost precipitous sides. The hollows, so far as he could see, were filled with spruce muskeg--the small rotting trees falling across each other with underbrush pushing up between. To traverse these places would be a very difficult matter.