rvard and asked Florian what his
university had been; an old girl whose name Florian never did learn; and
two others of Jessie Heath's age and general style. Florian found
himself as bewildered by their talk and views as though they had been
jabbering a foreign language. Every now and then, though, one of them
would turn to him for a bit of technical advice. If it happened to
concern equipment Florian could answer it readily enough. Ten years on
the fifth floor had taught him many things. But if the knowledge sought
happened to be of things geographical or of nature, he floundered,
struggled, sank. And it took them just about half a day to learn this.
The trip out takes four, from New York.

At first they asked him things to see him suffer. But they tired of
that, after a bit. It was too easy. Queerly enough, Jessie Heath,
mountain-wise though she was, believed in him almost to the end. But
that only made the next three weeks the bitterer for Florian Sykes. For
when it came to leaping from peak to peak Jessie turned out to be the
young gazelle. And she liked to have Florian with her. On the trail she
was a mosquito afoot, a jockey ahorseback. A thousand times, in those
three weeks of torture, he would fix his eye on a tree ten feet away, up
the steep trail. And to himself he would say, "I'll struggle, somehow,
as far as that tree, and then die under it." And he would stagger
another ten feet, his heart pounding in the unaccustomed altitude, his
lungs bursting, his lips parted, his breath coming sobbingly, his eyes
starting from his head. Leaping lightly ahead of him, around the bend,
was Jessie, always. She had a way of calling to the laggard--hallooing,
I believe it's supposed to be. And she expected an answer. An answer!
When your lungs were bursting through your chest and your heart was
crowding your tonsils. When he reached her it was always to find her
perched on a seemingly inaccessible rock, demanding that he join her to
admire the view. Before three days had gone by the sound of that halloo
with its breeziness and breath-control and power, made him sick all
over. Sometimes she sang, going up the trail. He could not have croaked
a note if failure to do it had meant instant death. The Harvard hellions
(it is his own term) were indefatigable, simian, pitiless. At nine
thousand feet they aimed at ten. At ten they would have nothing less
than twelve. At twelve thousand they were all for making another drive
for it an