t with a rattling shower of
stones and gravel. My head swung down, my impotent arms dangling, and I
stared straight at the glacier, a thousand feet below. Then my feet came
against the cliff.

"Work downwards with your feet."

I obeyed. He drew me close to him by crooking his arm and as my head
came up past his level he caught me by my collar with his teeth! My
feet struck the little two-inch shelf on which he was standing, and I
could see Muir, flattened against the face of the rock and facing it,
his right hand stretched up and clasping a little spur, his left holding
me with an iron grip, his head bent sideways, as my weight drew it. I
felt as alert and cool as he.

"I've got to let go of you," he hissed through his clenched teeth. "I
need both hands here. Climb upward with your feet."

How he did it, I know not. The miracle grows as I ponder it. The wall
was almost perpendicular and smooth. My weight on his jaws dragged him
outwards. And yet, holding me by his teeth as a panther her cub and
clinging like a squirrel to a tree, he climbed with me straight up ten
or twelve feet, with only the help of my iron-shod feet scrambling on
the rock. It was utterly impossible, yet he did it!

When he landed me on the little shelf along which we had come, my nerve
gave way and I trembled all over. I sank down exhausted, Muir only less
tired, but supporting me.

The sun had set; the air was icy cold and we had no coats. We would soon
chill through. Muir's task of rescue had only begun and no time was to
be lost. In a minute he was up again, examining my shoulders. The right
one had an upward dislocation, the ball of the humerus resting on the
process of the scapula, the rim of the cup. I told him how, and he soon
snapped the bone into its socket. But the left was a harder proposition.
The luxation was downward and forward, and the strong, nervous reaction
of the muscles had pulled the head of the bone deep into my armpit.
There was no room to work on that narrow ledge. All that could be done
was to make a rude sling with one of my suspenders and our
handkerchiefs, so as to both support the elbow and keep the arm from
swinging.

Then came the task to get down that terrible wall to the glacier, by the
only practicable way down the mountain that Muir, after a careful
search, could find. Again I am at loss to know how he accomplished it.
For an unencumbered man to descend it in the deepening dusk was a most
difficult task; b