Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 265, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1913 — CHAPTER XII. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

CHAPTER XII.

The Ascent.

Rising for three hundred feet as straight up as the side of one of the loftiest skyscrapers built, by man the cliffs arose, split from the mountain top by the wedges of the lightnings and guarding the summit by walls of almost absolute perpendicularity. In that hunt of the past he had seen a sheep upon the summit, and therefore knew that there must be a trail leading to the Top despite the fact that it was classed as inaccessible to human foot. Determined, therefore, that he should be the first human to trod its top, for miles he had worked his way about it with keenly searching eyes as he sought for the place where the first step must be made if he would attempt the ascent, found it at last, desperate and scanty to the extreme yet barely possible to one of much activity and steadiness. And with little regard for probable consequences he had undertaken it. It had been a supreme test of nerves and poise, but he had conquered it at last, reached the desolate, boulder haunted plateau and killed his sheep, and then had sat for hours upon the sheer edge as he nerved himself for what seemed a descent impossible to human being except at the expense of life or splintered bones. Yet having come tip he must go down, and down he eventually and safely arrived —though great good fortune attended him —and at last had stood beside the broken body of his kill which he had been obliged to tumble bodily from the height. That awful ascent and descent had ever since haunted him as an evil dream, a thing; not to be attempted again for all the wealth of the world, but now with the woman he loved borne there in the loathsome embrace of that arch enemy, of all mankind he sought for the suicidal path again with straining eagerness. Of March lying inert back there upon the rocks where his bullet had felled him he gave scarcely a thought. Obsessed by the idea that he alone could save the woman he sought, he would have regardlessly slain anything, man or beast, that he imagined might in aqy way impede his progress. Before him there lay a narrow shelf leading upward for a score of feet, broken, insecure and seeming to end in nothing but the blank wall itself, bht he recognized ' it instantly and stepped upon it. Arms extended, flattening himself against the rock as a leech clings, he felt his way upward with infinite caution, his fingers gripping each tiny crevass with the tenacity of the tentacles of a sqnld. He reached the end of the narrow shelf and there balanced .precariously upon six inches of outcropping, cast his glance eautkfasly upward and about Several feet to the right was another foothold equally insecure, but leading upward again, and with the care with which one treads a taut wire he placed his foot upon it, found a shallow finger hold in the cliff and raised himself. For fifty feet more he climbed as a fly scales a wall, .periled his life upon the two-inch support of a jutting point, mounted again with the superhuman cunning and strength of the insane and at the end of a half hour’s well nigh miraculous effort found for the first time during the ascent a shelf large enough to rest upon. He Was half way up now, and with a hundred and fifty feet of beetling cliff above and as much empty space below he sat down for a moment's heavy breathing. Through his disordered mind there ran riot a strange medley of the real and the unreal. Well enough he knew that he was scaling this height to save the woman whom he loved, yet he now conoelved the Flying Man to be of the supernatural, a winged monster of the inaccessible cliffs, a dragon of the noisome caverns that lay beneath the gorges, and that he was the knight chosen from all others because of his superior strength and valor to go forth and slay him at the portals of his rock bound domain. Well, slay him he would beyond the shadow of a doubt, but already the sun was getting low, the climb was still long and desperate and be must be on his way lest night and certain death should overtake him flattened against the blank wall of the drfigon's castle. Once more

he cautiously arose to resume his forts. He scanned the cliff. Just above bis head was another projection whidlt .'I promised a foothold could be but; reach It, and burying his fingers I* A l crack and finding an inch wide support for his foot he drew himself slowly upward. The slightest slip of bandfc’ or foot meant instant death now, **!f| his fingers gripped the Stone until they grew white and bloodless from | the strain. Slowly he raised found another grip and another Tagil support and with an effort that sent the blood surging to his temple* brought himself gasping one notch higher. Here again the ascent beeajfitff a trifle less precarious for a ways, and i another half-hour found him within a few feet of the summit Here of all places during the ascent he came the nearest to plunging the whole distance to the rocks below, but a lMt.<d|gffij perate struggle saved him and weak ’ and trembling from the supreme fort he threw himself down safely# over the edge. For a moment he rested, then cautiously arose and looked Uporf a far distant western peak the jj sun was balanced like a broad gold coin poised delicately. Its horizontal., rays swept the plateau upon which b* ,' stood, hut of rite heat that had gtms|| died him during that day of frenzied * pursuit scarce a vestige rematnedil| the thin air. Oh, that awful pursuitJ ; - His brain had seethed as a cauldrow * his body reeled like a drunken His numbed limbs responding to thd driving power of his will as ally as the unfeeling pistons of a machine; the uncanny flying bearing the woman of his heart ever close before his glazed eyes, while' March, his accursed rival, had ridden upon his back and borne him gem ipl like an old man of the sea. At time* it had seemed as though be would go mad. March! Had he shot him! tmm Tt, dimly seemed to him that he hffdT and had left him dead upon the rocks below. What of it! Had it not been that he had been compelled \p egrrm him on his back all day he would hay*, reached this height an hour'before—perhaps would have reached It la advance of the flying one and been prepared to meet him aa he alighted.. What mattered a dead man two In a case like this when a dragon was to be slain and a princess—his princess,, to be rescued! He laughed quicktjfJ; sharply, a single explosive sound morel like the bark of a beast than the sound of a human voice. He turned and faced the plateau. -|| Desolation. It stretched away to % broad sweep on either hand, volcanic, lumbered with the left ova* debris of mountain making—a jua&u shop of the unuseabie fragments creation. Boulders Utile as pebbfe%t huge as bouses were strewn on every vde, scattered broadcast, grouped *|9 pUes, heaped in monuments. Bar»e»s spaces lay between them. No thing invested the solitude save hi££i self and those to find whom he bad desperately risked his life in the ascent. To his disordered mind tt

seemed a battlefield well planned''toff the combat to come, for around thbfMl jumbled masses be could creep like:* panther until be could find the dra&Dfip and having found him — Silence. It invested all, throbbing; pulsating, ringing In his ears like t||| S Mice of a sea shell. It hung quivering the air, lying upon him as a smothering weight and filling all infinity. Thd' rapid exhaust of his lungs was lost to' its unechoing vastness, and when he uttered incoherently Ms voice W||| snatched from his lips and ita volume dissipated in the void until but ton whispered ghost remained. a ijwH (TO BE CONTINUED.!

Alan Came Crashing Down.