The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 Read Online Free PDF

word on January 1, 1919, that his brother had been put on a train in Strasbourg bound for France. Clifford was free.
    With Clifford’s safety now assured, Dudley realized he was still not ready to return home. He lingered in Europe for almost another year, spending most of his time in Paris and then in London with his uncle Lucien, where he met an entire family of Wolf cousins he hadn’t known existed. He saw pictures of his young father on Cécili’s piano, which now sat in Lucien’s parlor, and gave his uncle several pounds to have the photographs copied; he wanted to take a set home to Maine with him.
    After months of gentle urging from Mabel and Gwen, Dudley finally returned to America in the fall of 1919 and joined his mother, sister, brother, and stepfather in Omaha, where the Smith family banking and real estate businesses still flourished. For the next four years Dudley struggled to find his way in real estate, while Clifford, who had also returned a decorated veteran, came home a changed man and immediately began learning how to manage B. F.’s vast holdings. Dudley tried to embrace the business, but as he sat in the flat, dusty cow town of Omaha bent over probate documents and land titles, he yearned for the gentle hills and ocean breezes of Rockport. Each summer he eagerly returned to Maine and his first love, sailing. He entered every race he could find, from local regattas to world-class competitions, but he also relished the times he was alone on the ocean, absorbing the quiet solitude. He realized that war and sailing had a lot in common; although one was mired in chaos and the other in calm, he felt utterly detached from the world in each, and it was the solitude he cherished. Every year his summer vacation got longer until finally, in 1924, with the excuse of at last entering college in the fall, Dudley announced he was heading back east for good. Clicking along on the railroad his grandfather had helped build, Dudley watched the parched prairie grasses give way to the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, New York, the Berkshire Mountains, and, finally, the marble and brick office buildings of Boston. The ocean was only another hundred yards away.
    When the family gathered in Maine that summer, B. F. Smith called his grandsons to his estate in Warrenton Park overlooking Glen Cove. At ninety-four, B. F. was as sharp, canny, and proud as he had ever been. He explained that the good Smith name was in danger of disappearing.
    Dudley, Clifford, and Grafton looked uncomfortably at their cousin, Clifford Warren Smith, Jr., the only son of their late uncle who had died of the burst appendix over twenty years before. He was a Smith and already married; surely he would be able to sustain the Smith name? But as they glanced at Clifford Junior, they saw that he sat slumped in his chair and, although it was only two in the afternoon, he looked as if he had been drinking. The young man had been an embarrassment for years. B. F. had bought him out of many scrapes with the law; there had been an assortment of very young girlfriends; and, the family feared, a messy divorce loomed. Perhaps B. F. was right; if his legacy depended on Clifford Junior, it could be an ignoble end.
    For his part, B. F. didn’t want to chance his family legacy on this reckless boy having a son who could carry on the Smith name. As much as he had tried to instill the work ethic and a sense of responsibility into Clifford Junior, it was his daughter Mabel’s three boys who had made him proud: Grafton was an accomplished sailor who also showed promise as a horse breeder; Clifford had finally shaped up and taken over the family business; and Dudley had come back from Europe a decorated war hero and was an even greater talent than Grafton at the helm. Turning to his three Wolfe grandsons, he offered a proposition; if they would change their name from Wolfe to Smith, he would make them direct heirs of his fortune, rather than secondary