How they had ever come possessed of this erroneous idea, it would be
hard to discover; but they were young yet, and there remained for them
many uncut pages of life. Believers, also, in the efficacy of whisky as
a remedy for snake-bite, they had brought with them a fair supply of
medicine-chest liquor. As yet they had not touched it.

"Have some before we start?" Hazard asked.

Gus looked into the gulf and shook his head. "Better wait till we get up
higher and the climbing is more ticklish."

Some seventy feet above them projected the first eye-bolt. The winter
accumulations of ice had twisted and bent it down till it did not stand
more than a bare inch and a half above the rock--a most difficult object
to lasso as such a distance. Time and again Hazard coiled his lariat in
true cowboy fashion and made the cast, and time and again was he baffled
by the elusive peg. Nor could Gus do better. Taking advantage of
inequalities in the surface, they scrambled twenty feet up the Dome and
found they could rest in a shallow crevice. The cleft side of the Dome
was so near that they could look over its edge from the crevice and gaze
down the smooth, vertical wall for nearly two thousand feet. It was yet
too dark down below for them to see farther.

The peg was now fifty feet away, but the path they must cover to
get to it was quite smooth, and ran at an inclination of nearly fifty
degrees. It seemed impossible, in that intervening space, to find a
resting-place. Either the climber must keep going up, or he must slide
down; he could not stop. But just here rose the danger. The Dome was
sphere-shaped, and if he should begin to slide, his course would be, not