CHAPTER XII

Bennie Climbs the Mast of the Phantom Ship and Knows He Has Done Something

“Seeing that Bennie is such a glutton for exercise,” said Uncle Billy at breakfast the next morning, “what do you say we give him some, Stone?”

“We want to keep him well and happy, surely,” Mr. Stone answered, solemnly.

“Yes, we mustn’t let the little darling pine,” put in Dumplin’.

“Or his mighty muscles get flabby,” added Spider.

“You all think you’re having a great time, don’t you?” Bennie retorted. “Well, I’m all ready. I guess I’ll keep in the procession as long as the band plays.”

“All right,” said his uncle. “Let’s get cleared up here, and we’ll beat it down the trail and row out to the Phantom Ship. Bennie can row us out and back, and climb the mast between whiles, and then tote your camera, Stone, up the trail again home. Maybe that will restore his lost appetite.”

Bennie grinned amiably. “What’s the Phantom Ship?” he demanded.

“You’ll see.”

The boys noted with delight that Uncle Billy was taking his alpine rope. Lunches and cameras were carried, too. The trail down from the rim was now cleared of snow all the way, and the descent was quick and easy. But, at the bottom, they found that so many people had gone down ahead of them that all the boats were out. They had to wait two hours while some of the boatmen, who had gone across to the boat-house on Wizard Island, got the launch in commission over there, and towed back more boats.

“How did they ever get a launch down here?” asked Bennie.

“Brought it down in pieces and assembled it, I suppose,” Spider said. “Didn’t they?”

“Must have,” answered the doctor.

When the fresh supply of boats arrived, they pushed off, rowing in the opposite direction from Wizard Island. Now they passed directly under the jagged red walls of Eagle Crags, which form the north wall of Mount Garfield, and tower 2,000 feet above the water. Rounding Eagle Point, they saw Chaski Bay, invisible from the hotel, with a great snow-drift hanging over it, and beyond that another 2,000-foot cliff headland, with a long, steep talus slope of soft stuff leading up to the precipitous lava.

“What do you see right at the base of that cliff, in the water?” the doctor asked.

“Nothing,” said the boys. “Just some small rocks at the water’s edge.”

“Some small rocks, eh? Well, row on a bit. Keep in nearer shore, Bennie.”

Bennie rowed on another half mile, and again they looked at the rocks at the water’s edge below Dutton Cliff.

“Why,” Spider said, “those rocks are out in the water. They’re an island.”

“That’s the Phantom Ship. They call it a phantom because it looks like part of the cliff from a distance. You’ll see pretty soon why they call it a ship.”

Sure enough, they did see, in a very few moments. For, as the boats drew nearer, the detached rocks were seen to be much larger than they had appeared from a distance, where they had to be measured against the whole 2,000 feet of Dutton Cliff; and not only were they large, but they were really one solid mass of dark brown lava, much more pointed at the end which faced the lake, and with three sharp spires of lava, almost as sharp as an obelisk, sticking up exactly like three masts. To add still further to the illusion of a ship, they saw, as they drew still nearer, that the patches of green on the lava were really pine trees, which now began to look like sails.

“It is just like a ship!” Spider exclaimed. “It’s a ship made of lava, a three-master, sailing right out from Dutton Cliff!”

“Is it one of those masts we are going to climb?” Bennie suddenly demanded, a suspicion striking him.

“_You_ are—for the exercise,” said his uncle.

“Yes, I am! Say, I’m pretty good, but I’m no human fly. Gee, I don’t see even a finger-nail hold on ’em.”

“Don’t get impatient. Look down in the water a minute. Row slowly. Now let her drift.”

The boys looked down as the boat floated in toward the dark, straight sides of the Phantom Ship, down into the deep blue water. No bottom was visible, though the sunlight seemed to penetrate a long way down.

Then, suddenly, there was bottom! The bottom seemed to jump up at them, when the boat was about a hundred feet away from the ship. They had floated right on over the rim of a tremendous sunken precipice. Even here the bottom was apparently fifty feet below surface, yet they could see it clearly.

“Stop the boat a minute,” Spider said.

Bennie stopped it, and then took his oars out again. Spider, meanwhile, had taken a nickel from his pocket, and when the ripples had died down, he laid it carefully overboard, flat on the water. They watched it wabble and flutter rapidly down, but fast as it went, it was a long time reaching bottom, showing the depth. Yet they could see it plainly after it landed and lay shining on the rocks fifty feet below. Then they watched a big trout swim by, five or six feet under the surface, and they could see every detail of his color, his fins—all through water that was bluer than the sky!

“Now look up at the ship,” said Uncle Billy.

It towered above them now like a real ship, a ship 200 feet long, with masts 175 feet tall. Here, on the south side, the walls rose in an almost sheer precipice for many feet, with little clumps of bright flowers growing in the cracks and on the tiny ledges, which Spider instantly coveted for his collection of specimens that was going to help him get a merit badge in botany.

There was one place, however, near the bowsprit, where you could make a landing, and Mr. Stone was already getting out there and setting up his camera. As soon as it was up, he asked the two boats to row around behind the island, and then come into sight again, passing slowly under the side of the ship, so he could show both the boats and the lava cliff. After that he got Spider ashore, and took a movie of him crawling, wherever he could get a finger or toe hold, twenty feet up the ship’s side and picking a large clump of pentstemon from a crevice.

“Don’t you want to take me and Dumplin’ diving off into the water?” Bennie called.

“Sure, if you’ll do it,” Mr. Stone laughed. “Put your arm down as far in as you can get it first.”

Bennie pushed up his sleeve and did so. He pulled his arm out again quickly.

“Thanks, not today,” he said.

“The temperature when you get a ways below the surface remains at 39° winter and summer, the scientists have found,” the doctor smiled.

“It doesn’t feel more’n 29° on top,” said Bennie.

When the pictures were taken, they went around to the north side of the island, where the sides were not so steep, and taking the alpine rope, they all landed and scrambled up into the high saddle between the rear and the central mast—“the deck, this ought to be called,” they said.

When they got up in here, they found it was possible to climb still higher up the tallest mast (the rear mast), till they reached a sharp, complete crack which separated it into two parts. This crack had not been visible from the water.

“It’s a regular chimney,” Bennie exclaimed. “A chimney open at both sides. Do we go up that?”

“I don’t,” Dumplin’ answered. “I couldn’t get into it.”

“I don’t,” said his father. “I wouldn’t get into it.”

“It’s about forty feet from here to the top,” said Uncle Billy. “I know a man who climbed it. It took him an hour and fifteen minutes.”

Bennie wasn’t joking any more. He pulled himself up from the little platform where they were resting till he stood in the crack, and then he felt of the walls of smooth lava, and looked up for hand and foot holds.

“But there aren’t any holds,” he said. “Hanged if I see how _anybody_ can climb up here.”

“Oh, you’ll find a few holds, if I remember right, places where you can get a sort of apology for a rest,” his uncle said, casually.

“Say, are you joshing me or not? Did somebody really climb up here?”

For answer his uncle stepped into the chimney with him.

“This is the way,” he said.

He braced his back against one side of the crack by pressing hard with his hands against the other side. Then he raised both his feet free of the ground, while he held himself wedged by sheer muscle, and set his feet against the wall a little way up. Then he pressed so hard with his legs that they wedged him in, and raised his hands, hunching up his shoulders a few inches at the same time. Again bracing with his arms and shoulders, he got his feet up a few more inches. Then his hands and shoulders again. Progressing in this way, almost crawling, in fact, he was before long so far up in the chimney that Bennie could walk under him. Then, almost as slowly as he went up, he came down.

“You see, it can be done,” he said. “I don’t say it isn’t hard work. But you wanted exercise.”

“Give me the rope!” said Bennie, shortly.

“What’s the idea of the rope?” asked Lester.

“So the rest of you can get up,” Bennie answered.

He tied the rope under his arms, while his uncle held the coil, to play it out. Then he tried his shoes on the wall to see if the nails held, and found they would hold in the lava, where they slipped on granite or other hard rock, and began to work his way up. He worked in silence. Spider and Lester shouted joshing advice at him, advising him to use his teeth, to sit down a while where he was and take a rest, and anything else they could think of, but he was wasting no breath on replies. In fact, he needed all the breath, all the strength and all the attention he had to keep on going. A dozen times he thought he would have to give it up. Once he thought his strength was going to fail him and he would fall. That was when he was about twenty feet from the bottom. But each time he grit his teeth and either seemed to get a kind of second wind, or else found just the faintest hint of a foothold, or a handhold, so he could relieve for a moment the awful tension on his arms and back.

Toward the top, he was literally moving inch by inch, his strength was so far gone. He was just able to get his hands over the rim at last, take a good grip, and hold himself there while his strength came back enough to enable him to pull himself up over the top, and get his weight on to his stomach, where he hung for a full minute, with his legs dangling back into the crack.

Finally he pulled them up, too, and found himself on a tiny little space, hardly large enough to sit on, with the rocks and the lake 175 feet below him. It was like sitting on top of a church spire. Trembling with muscular exhaustion as he was, he didn’t care to sit there long. In fact, he took one good look down, had a feeling as if his stomach turned a flipflop, drew up half of the rope and turned it around the top of the spire, and then grasping both strands of the doubled rope, came sliding down the chimney.

His uncle gave him a pat on the shoulder.

“Good work,” was all he said, but Bennie knew then that he had really done something.

“Why didn’t you wait for us?” Spider demanded.

“Isn’t room on top for more’n one at a time,” Bennie replied. “Go on up and see what it’s like. Keep hold of both strands of the rope, though. How long did it take me?”

“About an hour and twenty minutes,” said Mr. Stone.

“Is that all?” said Bennie. “I felt as if it was day after tomorrow before I got there.”

And he sat down wearily.

Meanwhile Spider was hauling himself up on the doubled rope. He didn’t stay up much longer than Bennie, though.

“Kind o’ ticklish up here,” he called back. “Glad the wind doesn’t blow.”

Then he slid down. Nobody else wanted to go up, so the rope was pulled down, and the party descended to the boats again, to eat luncheon, which had been long delayed. Afterwards, they fished for an hour, and got enough trout for a meal.

“Want to row us home, Bennie?” his uncle asked.

“Spider hasn’t had a chance to row all day,” Bennie answered.

The mile of zigzag trail up from the lake to the rim seemed endless to Bennie that evening, and when the rest went over to the hotel after dinner to hear the music and watch the dancing, he felt like refusing. But he didn’t. He went, too, rubbing his eyes to keep them open.

“I guess you’ll sleep tonight, eh?” Uncle Billy said, when they finally got back to camp.

“I’m going to sleep so hard I’ll puncture the mattress,” Bennie answered.