The Pistol by James Jones Page A

of the height gave them the optical illusion that they could just simply sit down and slide all the way back down to the highway. But it was when they turned the other way and looked up that their eyes widened and awe really took them.
    “Are we going to carry all this up there ?” someone said.
    The Signal Corps Pfc, who wore a big sheath knife on his web pistol belt just behind his pistol and was apparently a member of some ‘Pioneers’ outfit or other, organized the unloading and the separation of the supplies into individual loads, and then prepared to leave.
    “But aren’t you going to help us carry this stuff up there?” Corporal Fondriere asked him.
    “Hell no,” the Signal Corps Pfc said. “You think I’m crazy?”
    “But what if we get lost?”
    “How can you get lost? There’s nowhere else to go. Unless you were to cross one of these side ridges and leave this draw entirely. If you could cross one of these side ridges. You follow this—” he paused, searching for an appropriate word, then gave up and jerked his head at the tangled, dry, boulder-strewn giant’s staircase, “—this creek bed up as far as it goes. Then you go straight on up about two hundred yards more, and there you are. It’s the saddle between the two high points. You can’t miss it.”
    He stared at them combatively for a moment, as if daring them even to try and miss it.
    “I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. What the hell do I want to go back for? Anyway it’ll take you three days to get this gear up there. See you in a week with your relief. Come on, mack,” he said to the driver.
    So the historic first Marconi Pass patrol stood dumbly and watched truck, driver and guide disappear down the mountainside, leaving them in what suddenly and for the first time appeared to be this remarkably hostile mountain wilderness, now that they were alone.
    “Well, let’s get with it,” Corporal Fondriere sighed.
    It did not, after all, actually take them three days to get the gear up. It took them only two days, two whole days. It was nearly noon when the truck left them and they started the first climb, and it was nearly noon of the third day when the last case of grenades started its trip to the top. Corporal Fondriere, who never had been a forceful man and who had acquired his corporal’s rank simply by staying in the Army nine years, decided that they would take the milk cans of water up first. There were four of these. They started off with all four, one to each man.
    At the first huge boulder they had to climb up around, two cans had to be left behind, and they were down to one can to each two men. Farther up, about three-quarters of the way to the top, where the mountain runlet became an actual rock chimney just before it came out onto the open slope, the third can was left precariously perched on a relatively level boulder, and they were down to four men to one can. Even so, they very nearly didn’t make it.
    Luckily, there were enough cracks and small ledges in the chimney so that they could rest the edge of the can on something whenever one or the other man had to move up to a new foothold. But when they came out breathing heavily onto the open slope, thinking their worst troubles were over, they discovered first that this slope which had appeared as such a haven from below was one of fifty or sixty degrees; and second they discovered that there was nothing up here, absolutely nothing, to hold onto except grass, which pulled out. The trees had stopped near the bottom of the chimney. Up here, they felt that they were really out in the open on the side of a roof. And that was exactly what it was like.
    The only way to surmount this new obstacle was to crawl, crablike, two men in front pulling and two behind shoving, and literally draw the milk can the last two hundred yards to the top. For every ten yards they gained someone would start to slip back, and the only way to stop was to roll over and dig your heels in under you.