She flourished her ice axe bravely.She flourished her ice axe bravely.Page163
“I am not Cæsar’s wife,” she replied; “but for the credit of womankind in general I shall act as though I was above suspicion—of nervousness.”
She did not look round. Barth was moving quickly, and she had no desire to burden him with a drag on the rope. When she was in the center of the narrow causeway, a snow cornice in the lip of the crevasse detached itself under the growing heat of the sun and shivered down into the green darkness. The incident brought her heart into her mouth. It served as a reminder that this solid ice river was really in a state of constant change and movement.
Bower laughed, with all his customary gayety of manner. “That came at a dramatic moment,” he said. “Too bad it could not let you pass without giving you a quake!”
“I am not a bit afraid.”
“Ah, but I can read your thoughts. There is a bond of sympathy between us.”
“Hemp is a non-conductor.”
“You are willfully misunderstanding me,” he retorted.
“No. I honestly believed you felt the rope quiver a little.”
“Alas! it is the atmosphere. My compliments fall on idle ears.”
Barth interrupted this play of harmless chaff by jerking some remark over his shoulder. “Looks like aguxe,” he said gruffly.
“Nonsense!” said Bower,—“a bank of mist. The sun will soon melt it.”
“It’s aguxe, right enough,” chimed in Karl, who had recovered his power of speech. “That is why the boy was blowing his horn—to show he was bringing the cattle home.”
“Well, then, push on. The sooner we are in the hut the better.”
“Please, what is aguxe?” asked Helen, when the men had nothing more to say.
“A word I would have wished to add later to your Alpine phrase book. It means a storm, a blizzard.”
“Should we not return at once in that event?”
“What? Who said just now she was not afraid?”
“But a storm in such a place!”
“These fellows smell atourmentein every little cloud from the southwest. We may have some wind and a light snowfall, and that will be an experience for you. Surely you can trust me not to run any real risk?”
“Oh, yes. I do, indeed. But I have read of people being caught in these storms and suffering terribly.”
“Not on the Forno, I assure you. I don’t wish to minimize the perils of your first ascent; but it is only fair to say that this is an exhibition glacier. If it was nearer town you would find an orchestra in each amphitheater up there, with sideshows in every couloir. Jesting apart, you are absolutely safe withBarth and me, not to mention the irrepressible gentleman who carries our provisions.”
Helen was fully alive to the fact that a woman who joins a mountaineering party should not impose her personal doubts on men who are willing to go on. She flourished her ice ax bravely, and cried, “Excelsior!”
In the next instant she regretted her choice of expression. The moral of Longfellow’s poem might be admirable, but the fate of its hero was unpleasantly topical. Again Bower laughed.
“Ah!” he said. “Will you deny now that I am a first rate receiver of wireless messages?”
She had no breath left for a quip. Barth was hurrying, and the thin air was beginning to have its effect. When an unusually smooth stretch of ice permitted her to take her eyes from the track for a moment she looked back to learn the cause of such haste. To her complete astonishment, the Maloja Pass and the hills beyond it were dissolved in a thick mist. A monstrous cloud was sweeping up the Orlegna Valley. As yet, it was making for the Muretto Pass rather than the actual ravine of the Forno; but a few wraiths of vapor were sailing high overhead, and it needed no weatherwise native to predict that ere long the glacier itself would be covered by that white pall. She glanced at Bower.
He smiled cheerfully. “It is nothing,” he murmured.
“I really don’t care,” she said. “One doesnot shirk an adventure merely because it is disagreeable. The pity is that all this lovely sunshine must vanish.”
“It will reappear. You will be charmed with the novelty in an hour or less.”
“Is it far to the hut?”
“Hardly twenty minutes at our present pace.”
A growl from Barth stopped their brief talk. Another huge crevasse yawned in front. There was an ice bridge, with snow, like others they had crossed; but this was a slender structure, and the leader stabbed it viciously with the butt of his ax before he ventured on it. The others kept the rope taut, and he crossed safely. They followed. As Helen gained the further side she heard Bower’s chuckle:
“Another thrill!”
“I am growing quite used to them,” she said.
“Well, it may help somewhat if I tell you that the temporary departure of the sun will cause this particular bridge to be ten times as strong when we return.”
“Attention!” cried Barth, taking a sharp turn to the left. The meaning of his warning was soon apparent. They had to descend a few feet of rough ice, and Helen found, to her great relief it must be confessed, that they were approaching the lateral moraine. Already the sky was overcast. The glacier had taken to itself a cold grayness that was disconcerting. The heavy mist fell on them with inconceivable rapidity. Shining peaks and toweringprecipices of naked rock were swept out of sight each instant. The weather had changed with a magical speed. The mist advanced with the rush of an express train, and a strong wind sprang up as though it had burst through a restraining wall and was bent on overwhelming the daring mortals who were penetrating its chosen territory.
Somehow—anyhow—Helen scrambled on. She was obliged to keep eyes and mind intent on each step. Her chief object was to imitate Barth, to poise, and jump, and clamber with feet and hands exactly as he did. At this stage the rope was obviously a hindrance; but none of the men suggested its removal, and Helen had enough to occupy her wits without troubling them by a question. Even in the stress of her own breathless exertions she had room in her mind for a wondering pity for the heavily laden Karl. She marveled that anyone, be he strong as Samson, could carry such a load and not fall under it. Yet he was lumbering along behind Bower with a clumsy agility that was almost supernatural to her thinking. She was still unconscious of the fact that most of her own struggles were due more to the rarefied air than to the real difficulties of the route.
At last, when she really thought she must cry out for a rest, when a steeper climb than any hitherto encountered had bereft her almost of the power to take another upward spring to the ledge of some enormous boulder, when her knees and ankles weresore and bruised, and the skin of her fingers was beginning to fray under her stout gloves, she found herself standing on a comparatively level space formed of broken stones. A rough wall, surmounted by a flat pitched roof, stared at her out of the mist. In the center of the wall a small, square, shuttered window suggested a habitation. Her head swam, and her eyes ached dreadfully; but she knew that this was the hut, and strove desperately to appear self possessed.
“Accept my congratulations, Miss Wynton,” said a low voice at her ear. “Not one woman in a thousand would have gone through that last half-hour without a murmur. You are no longer a novice. Allow me to present you with the freedom of the Alps. This is one of the many châteaux at your disposal.”
A wild swirl of sleet lashed them venomously. This first whip of the gale seemed to have the spitefulness of disappointed rage.
Helen felt her arm grasped. Bower led her to a doorway cunningly disposed out of the path of the dreaded southwest wind. At that instant all the woman in her recognized that the man was big, and strong, and self reliant, and that it was good to have him near, shouting reassuring words that were whirled across the rock-crowned glacier by the violence of the tempest.
Though the hut was a crude thing, a triumph of essentials over luxuries, Helen had never before hailed four walls and a roof with such heartfelt, if silent, thanksgiving. She sank exhausted on a rough bench, and watched the matter-of-fact Engadiners unpacking the stores and firewood carried in their rucksacks. Their businesslike air supplied the tonic she needed. Though the howling storm seemed to threaten the tiny refuge with destruction, these two men set to work, coolly and methodically, to prepare a meal. Barth arranged the contents of Karl’s bulky package on a small table, and the porter busied himself with lighting a fire in a Swiss stove that stood in the center of the outer room. An inner apartment loomed black and uninviting through an open doorway. Helen discovered later that some scanty accommodation was provided there for thosewho meant to sleep in the hut in readiness for an early ascent, while it supplied a separate room in the event of women taking part in an expedition.
Bower offered her a quantity of brandy and water. She declined it, declaring that she needed only time to regain her breath. He was a man who might be trusted not to pester anyone with well meant but useless attentions. He went to the door, lit a cigarette, and seemed to be keenly interested in the sleet as it pelted the moraine or gathered in drifts in the minor fissures of the glacier.
Within a remarkably short space of time, Karl had concocted two cups of steaming coffee. Helen was then all aglow. Her strength was restored. The boisterous wind had crimsoned her cheeks beneath the tan. She had never looked such a picture of radiant womanhood as after this tussle with the storm. Luckily her clothing was not wet, since the travelers reached thecabaneat the very instant the elements became really aggressive. It was a quite composed and reinvigorated Helen who summoned Bower from his contemplation of the weather portents.
“We may be besieged,” she cried; “but at any rate we are not on famine rations. What a spread! You could hardly have brought more food if you fancied we might be kept here a week.”
The sustained physical effort called for during the last part of the climb seemed to have dispelled his fit of abstraction. Being an eminently adaptableman, he responded to her mood. “Ah, that sounds more like the enthusiast who set forth so gayly from the Kursaal this morning,” he answered, pulling the door ajar before he took a seat by her side on the bench. “A few minutes ago you were ready to condemn me as several kinds of idiot for going on in the teeth of our Switzers’ warnings. Now, confess!”
“I don’t think I could have climbed another ten yards,” she admitted.
“Our haste was due to Barth’s anxiety. He wanted to save you from a drenching. It was a near thing, and with the thermometer falling a degree a minute soaked garments might have brought very unpleasant consequences. But that was our only risk. Old mountaineer as I am, I hardly expected such a blizzard in August, after such short notice too. Otherwise, now that we are safely housed, you are fortunate in securing a memorable experience. The storm will soon blow over; but it promises to be lively while it lasts.”
Helen was sipping her coffee. Perhaps her eyes conveyed the question her tongue hesitated to utter. Bower smiled pleasantly, and gesticulated with hands and shoulders in a way that was foreign to his studiously cultivated English habit of repose. Indeed, with his climber’s garb he seemed to have acquired a new manner. There was a perplexing change in him since the morning.
“Yes,” he said. “I understand perfectly. Youand I might singlieder ohne worte, Miss Wynton. I have known these summer gales to last four days; but pray do not be alarmed,” for Helen nearly dropped her cup in quick dismay; “my own opinion is that we shall have a delightful afternoon. Of course, I am a discredited prophet. Ask Barth.”
The guide, hearing his name mentioned, glanced at them, though he was engaged at the moment in taking the wrappings off a quantity of bread, cold chicken, and slices of ham and beef. He agreed with Bower. The barometer stood high when they left the hotel. He thought, as all men think who live in the open, that “the sharper the blast the sooner it’s past.”
“Moreover,” broke in Karl, who refused to be left out of the conversation, “Johann Klucker’s cat was sitting with its back to the stove last evening.”
This bit of homely philosophy brought a ripple of laughter from Helen, whereupon Karl explained.
“Cats are very wise,fräulein. Johann Klucker’s cat is old. Therefore she is skilled in reading the tokens of the weather. A cat hates wind and rain, and makes her arrangements accordingly. If she washes herself smoothly, the next twelve hours will be fine. If she licks against the grain, it will be wet. When she lies with her back to the fire, there will surely be a squall. When her tail is up and her coat rises, look out for wind.”
“Johann Klucker’s cat has settled the dispute,” said Bower gravely in English. “A squall it is,—amost suitable prediction for a cat,—and I am once more rehabilitated in your esteem, I hope?”
A cold iridescence suddenly illumined the gloomy interior of the hut. It gave individuality to each particle of sleet whirling past the door. Helen thought that the sun had broken through the storm clouds for an instant; but Bower said quietly:
“Are you afraid of lightning?”
“Not very. I don’t like it.”
“Some people collapse altogether when they see it. Perhaps when forewarned you are forearmed.”
A low rumble boomed up the valley, and the mountain echoes muttered in solemn chorus.
“We are to be spared none of the scenic accessories, then?” said Helen.
“None. In fact, you will soon see and hear a thunder storm that would have delighted Gustave Doré. Please remember that it cannot last long, and that this hut has been built twenty years to my knowledge.”
Helen sipped her coffee, but pushed away a plate set before her by Barth. “If you don’t mind, I should like the door wide open,” she said.
“You prefer to lunch later?”
“Yes.”
“And you wish to face the music—is that it?”
“I think so.”
“Let me remind you that Jove’s thunderbolts are really forged on the hilltops.”
“I am here; so I must make the best of it. Ishall not scream, or faint, if that is what you dread.”
“I dread nothing but your anger for not having turned back when a retreat was possible. I hate turning back, Miss Wynton. I have never yet withdrawn from any enterprise seriously undertaken, and I was determined to share your first ramble among my beloved hills.”
Another gleam of light, bluer and more penetrating than its forerunner, lit the brown rafters of thecabane. It was succeeded by a crash like the roar of massed artillery. The walls trembled. Some particles of mortar rattled noisily to the floor. A strange sound of rending, followed by a heavy thud, suggested something more tangible than thunderbolts. Bower kicked the door and it swung inward.
“An avalanche,” he said. “Probably a rockfall too. Of course, the hut stands clear of the track of unpleasant visitors of that description.”
Helen had not expected this courageous bearing in a man of Bower’s physical characteristics. Hitherto she had regarded him as somewhat self indulgent, a Sybarite, the product of modernity in its London aspects. His demeanor in the train, in the hotel, bespoke one accustomed to gratify the flesh, who found all the world ready to pander to his desires. Again she was conscious of that instinctive trustfulness a woman freely reposes in a dominant man. Oddly enough, she thought of Spencer in the same breath. An hour earlier, had she been askedwhich of these two would command her confidence during a storm, her unhesitating choice would have favored the American. Now, she was at least sure that Bower’s coolness was not assumed. His attitude inspired emulation. She rose and went to the door.
“I want to see an avalanche,” she cried. “Where did that one fall?”
Bower followed her. He spoke over her shoulder. “On Monte Roseg, I expect. The weather seems to be clearing slightly. This tearing wind will soon roll up the mist, and the thunder will certainly start another big rock or a snowslide. If you are lucky, you may witness something really fine.”
A dazzling flash leaped over the glacier. Although the surrounding peaks were as yet invisible through the haze of sleet and vapor, objects near at hand were revealed with uncanny distinctness. Each frozen wave on the surface of the ice was etched in sharp lines. A cluster of séracs on a neighboring icefall showed all their mad chaos. The blue green chasm of a huge crevasse was illumined to a depth far below any point to which the rays of the sun penetrated. On the neighboring slope of Monte Roseg the crimson and green and yellow mosses were given sudden life against the black background of rock. Every boulder here wore a somber robe. They were stark and grim. The eye instantly caught the contrast to their gray-white fellows piled on the lower moraine or in the bed of the Orlegna.
Helen was quick to note the new tone of black amid the vividly white patches of snow. She waited until the deafening thunder peal was dying away in eerie cadences. “Why are the rocks black here and almost white in the valley?” she asked.
“Because they are young, as rocks go,” was the smiling answer. “They have yet to pass through the mill. They will be battered and bruised and polished before they emerge from the glacier several years hence and a few miles nearer peace. In that they resemble men. ’Pon my word, Miss Wynton, you have caused me to evolve a rather poetic explanation of certain gray hairs I have noticed of late among my own raven locks.”
“You appear to know and love these hills so well that I wonder—if you will excuse a personal remark—I wonder you ever were able to tear yourself away from them.”
“I have missed too much of real enjoyment in the effort to amass riches,” he said slowly. “Believe me, that thought has held me since—since you and I set foot on the Forno together.”
“But you knew? You were no stranger to the Alps? I am beginning to understand that one cannot claim kinship with the high places until they stir the heart more in storm than in sunshine. When I saw all these giants glittering in the sun like knights in silver armor, I described them to myself as gloriously beautiful. Now I feel that they are more than that,—they are awful, pitiless in theirindifference to frail mortals; they carry me into a dim region where life and death are terms without meaning.”
“Yes, that is the true spirit of the mountains. I too used to look on them with affectionate reverence, and you recall the old days. Perhaps, if I am deemed worthy, you will teach me the cult once more.”
He bent closer. Helen became conscious that in her enthusiasm she had spoken unguardedly. She moved away, slightly but unmistakably, a step or two out into the open, for the hut on that side was not exposed to the bitter violence of the wind.
“It is absurd to imagine us in a change of rôle,” she cried. “I should play the poorest travesty of Mentor to your Telemachus. Oh! What is that?”
While she was speaking, another blinding flare of lightning flooded moraine and glacier and pierced the veil of sleet. Her voice rose almost to a shriek. Bower sprang forward. His left hand rested reassuringly across her shoulders.
“Better come inside the hut,” he began.
“But I saw someone—a white face—staring at me down there!”
“It is possible. There is no cause for fear. A party may have crossed from Italy. There would be none from the Maloja at this hour.”
Helen was actually trembling. Bower drew her a little nearer. He himself was unnerved, a prey to wilder emotions than she could guess till laterdays brought a fuller understanding. It was a mad trick of fate that threw the girl into his embrace just then, for another far-flung sheet of fire revealed to her terrified vision the figures of Spencer and Stampa on the rocks beneath. With brutal candor, the same flash showed her nestling close to Bower. For some reason, she shuddered. Though the merciful gloom of the next few seconds restored her faculties, her face and neck were aflame. She almost felt that she had been detected in some fault. Her confusion was not lessened by hearing a muttered curse from her companion. Careless of the stinging sleet, she leaped down to a broad tier of rock below the plateau of the hut and cried shrilly:
“Is that really you, Mr. Spencer?”
A more tremendous burst of thunder than any yet experienced dwarfed all other sounds for an appreciable time. The American scrambled up, almost at her feet, and stood beside her. Stampa came quick on his heels, moving with a lightness and accuracy of foothold amazing in one so lame.
“Just me, Miss Wynton. Sorry if I have frightened you, but our old friend here was insistent that we should hurry. I have been tracking you since nine o’clock.”
Spencer’s words were nonchalantly polite. He even raised his cap, though the fury of the ice laden blast might well have excused this formal act of courtesy. Helen was still blushing so painfully that she became angry with herself, and her voice washardly under control. Nevertheless, she managed to say:
“How kind and thoughtful of you! I am all right, as you see. Mr. Bower and the guide were able to bring me here before the storm broke. We happened to be standing near the door, watching the lightning. When I caught a glimpse of you I was so stupidly startled that I screamed and almost fell into Mr. Bower’s arms.”
Put in that way, it did not sound so distressing. And Spencer had no desire to add further difficulties to a situation already awkward.
“Guess you scared me too,” he said. “I suppose, now we are at the hut, Stampa will not object to my waiting five minutes or so before we start for home.”
“Surely you will lunch with us. Everything is set out on the table, and we have food enough for a regiment.”
“You would need it if you remained here another couple of hours, Miss Wynton. Stampa tells me that a first rateguxe, which is Swiss for a blizzard, I believe, is blowing up. This thunder storm is the preliminary to a heavy downfall of snow. That is why I came. If we are not off the glacier before two o’clock, it will become impassable till a lot of the snow melts.”
“What is that you are saying?” demanded Bower bruskly. Helen and the two men had reached the level of thecabane; but Stampa, thinking theywould all enter, kept in the rear, “If that fairy tale accounts for your errand, you are on a wild goose chase, Mr. Spencer.”
He had not heard the American’s words clearly; but he gathered sufficient to account for the younger man’s motive in following them, and was furiously annoyed by this unlooked for interruption. He had no syllable of thanks for a friendly action. Though no small risk attended the crossing of the Forno during a gale, it was evident he strongly resented the presence of both Spencer and the guide.
Helen, after her first eager outburst, was tongue tied. She saw that her would-be rescuers were dripping wet, and was amazed that Bower should greet them so curtly, though, to be sure, she believed implicitly that the storm would soon pass. Stampa was already inside the hut. He was haranguing Barth and the porter vehemently, and they were listening with a curious submissiveness.
Spencer was the most collected person present. He brushed aside Bower’s acrimony as lightly as he had accepted Helen’s embarrassed explanation. “This is not my hustle at all,” he said. “Stampa heard that his adoredsigñorina——”
“Stampa! Is that Stampa?”
Bower’s strident voice was hushed to a hoarse murmur. It reminded one of his hearers of a growling dog suddenly cowed by fear. Helen’s ears were tuned to this perplexing note; but Spencer interpreted it according to his dislike of the man.
“Stampa heard,” he went on, with cold-drawn precision, “that Miss Wynton had gone to the Forno. He is by far the most experienced guide to be found on this side of the Alps, and he believes that anyone remaining up here to-day will surely be imprisoned in the hut a week or more by bad weather. In fact, even now an hour may make all the difference between danger and safety. Perhaps you can convince him he is wrong. I know nothing about it, beyond the evidence of my senses, backed up by some acquaintance with blizzards. Anyhow, I am inclined to think that Miss Wynton will be wise if she listens to the points of the argument in the hotel.”
“Perhaps it would be better to return at once,” said Helen timidly. Her sensitive nature warned her that these two men were ready to quarrel, and that she herself, in some nebulous way, was the cause of their mutual enmity.
Beyond this her intuition could not travel. It was impossible that she should realize how sorely her wish to placate Bower disquieted Spencer. He had seen the two under conditions that might, indeed, be explicable by Helen’s fright; but he would extend no such charitable consideration to Bower, whose conduct, no matter how it was viewed, made him a rival. Yes, it had come to that. Spencer had hardly spoken a word to Stampa during the toilsome journey from Maloja. He had looked facts stubbornly in the face, and the looking served to clear certaindoubts from his heart and brain. He wanted to woo and win Helen for his wife. He was enmeshed in a net of his own contriving, and its strands were too strong to be broken. If Helen was reft from him now, he would gaze on a darkened world for many a day.
But he was endowed with a splendid self control. That element of cast steel in his composition, discovered by Dunston after five minutes’ acquaintance, kept him rigid under the strain.
“Sorry I should figure as spoiling your excursion, Miss Wynton,” he was able to say calmly; “but, when all is said and done, the weather is bad, and you will have plenty of fine days later.”
Bower crept nearer. His action suggested stealth. Although the wind was howling under the deep eaves of the hut, he almost whispered. “Yes, you are right—quite right. Let us go now—at once. With you and me, Mr. Spencer, Miss Wynton will be safe—safer than with the guides. They can follow with the stores. Come! There is no time to be lost!”
The others were so taken aback by his astounding change of front that they were silent for an instant. It was Helen who protested, firmly enough.
“The lightning seems to have given us an attack of nerves,” she said. “It would be ridiculous to rush off in thatmanner——”
“But there is peril—real peril—in delay. I admit it. I was wrong.”
Bower’s anxiety was only too evident. Spencer, regarding him from a single viewpoint, deemed him a coward, and his gorge rose at the thought.
“Oh, nonsense!” he cried contemptuously. “We shall be two hours on the glacier, so five more minutes won’t cut any ice. If you have food and drink in there, Stampa certainly wants both. We all need them. We have to meet that gale all the way. The two hours may become three before we reach the path.”
Helen guessed the reason of his disdain. It was unjust; but the moment did not permit of a hint that he was mistaken. To save Bower from further commitment—which, she was convinced, was due entirely to regard for her own safety—she went into the hut.
“Stampa,” she said, “I am very much obliged to you for taking so much trouble. I suppose we may eat something before we start?”
“Assuredly,fräulein,” he cried. “Am I not here? Were it to begin to snow at once, I could still bring you unharmed to the chalets.”
Josef Barth had borne Stampa’s reproaches with surly deference; but he refused to be degraded in this fashion—before Karl, too, whose tongue wagged so loosely.
“That is the talk of a foolish boy, not of a man,” he cried wrathfully. “Am I not fitted, then, to take mademoiselle home after bringing her here?”
“Truly, on a fine day, Josef,” was the smiling answer.
“I told monsieur that aguxewas blowing up from the south; so did Karl; but he would not hearken.Ma foi!I am not to blame.” Barth, on his dignity, introduced a few words of French picked up from the Chamounix men. He fancied they would awe Stampa, and prove incidentally how wide was his own experience.
The old guide only laughed. “A nice pair, you and Karl,” he shouted. “Are the voyageurs in your care or not? You told monsieur, indeed! You ought to have refused to take mademoiselle. That would have settled the affair, I fancy.”
“But this monsieur knows as much about the mountains as any of us. He might surprise even you, Stampa. He has climbed the Matterhorn from Zermatt and Breuil. He has come down the rock wall on the Col des Nantillons. How is one to argue with such avoyageuron this child’s glacier?”
Stampa whistled. “Oh—knows the Matterhorn, does he? What is his name?”
“Bower,” said Helen,—“Mr. Mark Bower.”
“What! Say that again,fräulein! Mark Bower? Is that your English way of putting it?”
Helen attributed Stampa’s low hiss to a tardy recognition of Bower’s fame as a mountaineer. Though the hour was noon, the light was feeble. Veritable thunder clouds had gathered above themist, and the expression of Stampa’s face was almost hidden in the obscurity of the hut.
“That is his name,” she repeated. “You must have heard of him. He was well known on the high Alps—years ago.” She paused before she added those concluding words. She was about to say “in your time,” but the substituted phrase was less personal, since the circumstances under which Stampa ceased to be a notability in “the street” at Zermatt were in her mind.
“God in heaven!” muttered the old man, passing a hand over his face as though waking from a dream,—“God in heaven! can it be that my prayer is answered at last?” He shambled out.
Spencer had waited to watch the almost continuous blaze of lightning playing on the glacier. Distant summits were now looming through the diminishing downpour of sleet. He was wondering if by any chance Stampa might be mistaken. Bower stood somewhat apart, seemingly engaged in the same engrossing task. The wind was not quite so fierce as during its first onset. It blew in gusts. No longer screaming in a shrill and sustained note, it wailed fitfully.
Stampa lurched unevenly close to Bower. He was about to touch him on the shoulder; but he appeared to recollect himself in time.
“Marcus Bauer,” he said in a voice that was terrible by reason of its restraint.
Bower wheeled suddenly. He did not flinch. Hismanner suggested a certain preparedness. Thus might a strong man face a wild beast when hope lay only in the matching of sinew against sinew. “That is not my name,” he snarled viciously.
“Marcus Bauer,” repeated Stampa in the same repressed monotone, “I am Etta’s father.”
“Why do you address me in that fashion? I have never before seen you.”
“No. You took care of that. You feared Etta’s father, though you cared little for Christian Stampa, the guide. But I have seen you, Marcus Bauer. You were slim then—an elegant, is it not?—and many a time have I hobbled into the Hotel Mont Cervin to look at your portrait in a group lest I should forget your face. Yet I passed you just now! Great God! I passed you.”
A ferocity glared from Bower’s eyes that might well have daunted Stampa. For an instant he glanced toward Spencer, whose clear cut profile was silhouetted against a background of white-blue ice now gleaming in a constant flutter of lightning. Stampa was not yet aware of the true cause of Bower’s frenzy. He thought that terror was spurring him to self defense. An insane impulse to kill, to fight with the nails and teeth, almost mastered him; but that must not be yet.
“It is useless, Marcus Bauer,” he said, with a calmness so horribly unreal that its deadly intent was all the more manifest. “I am the avenger, not you. I can tear you to pieces with my hands whenI will. It would be here and now, were it not for the presence of the Englishsigñorinawho saved me from death. It is not meet that she should witness your expiation. That is to be settled between you and me alone.”
Bower made one last effort to assert himself. “You are talking in riddles, man,” he said. “If you believe you have some long forgotten grievance against one of my name, come and see me to-morrow at the hotel.Perhaps——”
“Yes, I shall see you to-morrow. Do not dream that you can escape me. Now that I know you live, I would search the wide world for you. Blessed Mother! How you must have feared me all these years!”
Stampa was using the Romansch dialect of the Italian Alps. Bower spoke in German. Spencer heard them indistinctly. He marveled that they should discuss, as he imagined, the state of the weather with such subdued passion.
“Hello, Christian,” he cried, “the clouds are lifting somewhat. Where is your promised snow?”
Stampa peered up into Bower’s face; for his twisted leg had reduced his own unusual height by many inches. “To-morrow!” he whispered. “At ten o’clock—outside the hotel. Then we have a settlement. Is it so?”
There was no answer. Bower was wrestling with a mad desire to grapple with him and fling him down among the black rocks. Stampa crept nearer. Aghastly smile lit his rugged features, and hispickelclattered to the broken shingle at his feet.
“I offer you to-morrow,” he said. “I am in no hurry. Have I not waited sixteen years? But it may be that you are tortured by a devil, Marcus Bauer. Shall it be now?”
The clean-souled peasant believed that the millionaire had a conscience. Not yet did he understand that balked desire is stronger than any conscience. It really seemed that nothing could withhold these two from mortal struggle then and there. Spencer was regarding them curiously; but they paid no heed to him. Bower’s tongue was darting in and out between his teeth. The red blood surged to his temples. Stampa was still smiling. His lips moved in the strangest prayer that ever came from a man’s heart. He was actually thanking the Madonna—mother of the great peacemaker—for having brought his enemy within reach!
“Mr. Bower!” came Helen’s voice from the door of thecabane. “Why don’t you join us? And you, Mr. Spencer? Stampa, come here and eat at once.”
“To-morrow, at ten? Or now?” the old man whispered again.
“To-morrow—curse you!”
Stampa twisted himself round. “I am not hungry,fräulein,” he cried. “I ate chocolate all the way up the glacier. But do you be speedy. We have lost too much time already.”
Bower brushed past, and the guide stooped to recover his ice ax. Spencer, though troubled sufficiently by his own disturbing fantasies, did not fail to notice their peculiar behavior. But he answered Helen with a pleasant disclaimer.
“Christian kept his hoard a secret, Miss Wynton. I too have lost my appetite,” said he.
“Once we start we shall hardly be able to unpack the hamper again,” said Helen.
The American was trying her temper. She suspected that he carried his hostility to the absurd pitch of refusing to partake of any food provided by Bower. It was a queer coincidence that Spencer harbored the same notion with regard to Stampa, and wondered at it.
“I shall starve willingly,” he said. “It will be a just punishment for declining the good things that did not tempt me when they were available.”
Bower poured out a quantity of wine and drank it at a gulp. He refilled the glass and nearly emptied it a second time. But he touched not a morsel of meat or bread. Helen, fortunately, attributed the conduct of the men to spleen. She ate a sandwich, and found that she was far more ready for a meal than she had imagined.
Stampa’s broad frame darkened the doorway. He told Karl not to burden himself with anything save the cutlery. Now that he was the skilled guide again, the leader in whom they trusted, his worn face was animated and his voice eager.
Helen heard Spencer’s exclamation without.
“By Jove, Stampa! you are right! Here comes the snow.”
“Quick, quick!” cried Stampa. “Vorwärtz, Barth. You lead. Stop at my call. Karl next—then thefräuleinand my monsieur. Yours follows, and I come last.”
“No, no!” burst out Bower, lowering a third glass of wine from his lips.
“Che diavolo!It shall be as I have said!” shouted Stampa, with an imperious gesture. Helen remarked it; but things were being done and said that were inexplicable. Even Bower was silenced.
“Are we to be roped, then?” growled Barth.
“Have you never crossed ice during a snow storm?” asked Stampa.
In a few minutes they were ready. The lightning flashes were less frequent, and the thunder was muttering far away amid the secret places of the Bernina. The wind was rising again. Instead of sleet it carried snowflakes, and these did not sting the face nor patter on the ice. But they clung everywhere, and the sable rocks were taking unto themselves a new garment.
“Vorwärtz!” rang out Stampa’s trumpet like call, and Barth leaped down into the moraine.
Barth, a good man on ice and rock, was not a genius among guides. Faced by an apparently unscalable rock wall, or lost in a wilderness of séracs, he would never guess the one way that led to success. But he was skilled in the technic of his profession, and did not make the mistake now of subjecting Helen or Spencer to the risk of an ugly fall. The air temperature had dropped from eighty degrees Fahrenheit to below freezing point. Rocks that gave safe foothold an hour earlier were now glazed with an amalgam of sleet and snow. If, in his dull mind, he wondered why Spencer came next to Helen, rather than Bower or Stampa,—either of whom would know exactly when to give that timely aid with the rope that imparts such confidence to the novice,—he said nothing. Stampa’s eye was on him. His pride was up in arms. It behooved him topress on at just the right pace, and commit no blunder.
Helen, who had been glad to get back to the moraine during the ascent, was ready to breathe a sigh of relief when she felt her feet on the ice again. Those treacherous rocks were affrighting. They bereft her of trust in her own limbs. She seemed to slip here and there without power to check herself. She expected at any moment to stumble helplessly on some cruelly sharp angle of a granite boulder, and find that she was maimed so badly as to render another step impossible. More than once she was sensible that the restraining pull on the rope alone held her from disaster. Her distress did not hinder the growth of a certain surprise that the American should be so sure footed, so quick to judge her needs. When by his help a headlong downward plunge was converted into a harmless slide over the sloping face of a rock, she half turned.
“I must thank you for that afterward,” she said, with a fine effort at a smile.
“Eyes front, please,” was the quiet answer.
Under less strenuous conditions it might have sounded curt; but the look that met hers robbed the words of their tenseness, and sent the hot blood tingling in her veins. Bower had never looked at her like that. Just as some unusually vivid flash of lightning revealed the hidden depths of a crevasse, bringing plainly before the eye chinks and crannies not discernible in the strongest sunlight, so did theglimpse of Spencer’s soul illumine her understanding. He was not only safeguarding her, but thinking of her, and the stolen knowledge set up a bewildering tumult in her heart.
“Attention!” shouted Barth, halting and making a drive at something with his ax.
The line stopped. Stampa’s ringing voice came over Helen’s head:
“What is that ahead there?”
“A new fall, I think. We ought to leave the moraine a little lower down; but this was not here when we ascended.”
How either man, Stampa especially, could see anything at all, was beyond the girl’s comprehension. The snow was absolutely blinding. The wind was full in their faces, and it carried the huge flakes upward. They seemed to spring from beneath rather than drop from the clouds. Ever and anon a weirdly blue gleam of lightning would give a demoniac touch to a scene worthy of the Inferno.
“Make for the ice—quick!” cried Stampa, and Barth turned sharply to the left. Falling stones were now their chief danger, and both men were anxious to avoid it.
After a brief scramble they mounted the curving glacier. A fiercer gust shrieked at them and swept some small space clear of snow. Helen had a dim vision of lightning playing above the crest of a great mound on the edge of the ice field,—a mound that she did not remember seeing before. Then thegale sank back to its sustained howling, the snow swirled in denser volume, and the specter vanished.
Ere they had gone another hundred yards, Barth’s hoarse warning checked them again. “The bridge has fallen!” was his cry. “There has been an ice movement.”
There was a question in the man’s words. Here was a nice point submitted to his judgment,—whether to follow the line of the recently formed schrund yawning at his feet, or endeavor to cross it, or go back to the scene of the landslip? That was where Barth was lacking. In that instant he resigned his pride of place without further effort to retain it. He was in the van, but did not lead. Thenceforth Stampa was master.
“What is the width—ten meters?” demanded the old guide cheerfully.
“About that.”
“All the better. It is not deep here. The shock of that avalanche opened it up. You will find a way down. Cut the steps close together. You know how to polish them, Karl?”
“Yes, I can do that,” said the porter.
“And watch thesigñorina’sfeet.”
“Yes, I’ll take care.”
Barth was peering fixedly into the chasm. To Helen’s fancy it was bottomless, though in reality it was not more than forty feet deep, and the two walls fell away from each other at a practicable angle. In normal summer weather, a small crevassealways formed there owing to the glacier flowing over a transverse ridge of rock beneath. To-day the impact of many thousands of tons of débris had disrupted the ice to an unusual extent. Having decided on the best line, the leading guide stepped over into space. Helen heard his ax ringing as he fashioned secure foothold down the steep ledge he had selected. He was quite trustworthy in such work.
Stampa, who had a thought for none save Helen, gave her a reassuring word. “Barth will find a way,fräulein,” he said. “And Herr Spencer knows how you should cross your feet and carry your ax, while Karl will see to your foothold. Remember too that you will be at the bottom before I begin the descent, so no harm can come to you. Try and stand straight. Don’t lean against the slope. Lean away from it. Don’t be afraid. Don’t trust to the rope or the grip of the ax. Rely on your own stand.”
It was no time to pick and choose phrases, yet Helen realized the oddity of the absence of any reference to Bower. One other in the party had a thought somewhat akin to hers; but he slurred it over in his mind, and seized the opportunity to help her by a casual remark.
“Guess you hardly expected genuine ice work in to-day’s trip?” he said. “Stampa and I had a lot of it last week. It’s as easy as walking down stairs when you know how.”
“I don’t think I am afraid,” she answered; “but I should have preferred to walk up stairs first. Thisis rather reversing the natural order of things, isn’t it?”
“Nature loves irregularities. That is why the prize girl in every novel has irregular features. A heroine with a Greek face would kill a whole library.”
“Vorwärtz—es geht!”
Barth’s gruff voice sounded hollow from the depths. Karl, in his turn, went over the lip of the crevasse. Helen, conscious of an exaltation that lifted her out of the region of ignoble fear, looked down. She could see now what was being done. Barth was swinging his ax and smiting the ice with the adz. His head was just below the level of her feet, though he was distant the full length of two sections of the rope. He had cut broad black steps. They did not seem to present any great difficulty. Helen found herself speculating on the remarkable light effects that made these notches black in a gray-green wall.
“Right foot first,” said Spencer quietly. “When that is firmly fixed, throw all your weight on it, and bring the left down. Then the right again. Hold the pick breast high.”
“So!” cried Karl appreciatively, watching her first successful effort.
As Spencer was lowering himself into the crevasse, he heard something that set his nimble wits agog. Stampa, the valiant and light hearted Stampa, the genial companion who had laughed and jested even when they were crossing an ice slope on the giantMonte della Disgrazia,—a traverse of precarious clinging, where a slip meant death a thousand feet below,—was muttering strangely at Bower.
“Schwein-hund!” he was saying, “if any evil befalls thefräulein, I shall drive my ax between your shoulder blades.”
There was no reply. Spencer was sure he was not mistaken. Though the guide spoke German, he knew enough of that language to understand this comparatively simple sentence. Quite as amazing as Stampa’s threat was Bower’s silent acceptance of it. He began to piece together some fleeting impressions of the curious wrangle between the two outside the hut. He recalled Bower’s extraordinary change of tone when told that a man named Christian Stampa had followed him from Maloja.
Helen was just taking another confident step forward and down, balancing herself with graceful assurance. Spencer had a few seconds in which to steal a backward glance, and a flash of lightning happened to glimmer on Bower’s features. The American was not given to fanciful imaginings; but during many a wild hour in the Far West he had seen the baleful frown of murder on a man’s face too often not to recognize it now in this snow scourged cleft of a mighty Alpine glacier. Yet he was helpless. He could neither speak nor act on a mere opinion. He could only watch, and be on his guard. From that moment he tried to observe every movement not only of Helen but of Bower.
The members of the party were roped at intervals of twenty feet. Allowing for the depth of the crevasse, the amount of rope taken up in their hands ready to be served out as occasion required, and the inclination of Barth’s line of descent, the latter ought to be notching the opposing wall before Stampa quitted the surface of the glacier. Though Spencer could not see Stampa now, he knew that the rear guide was bracing himself strongly against any tell-tale jerk, with the additional security of an anchor obtained by driving the pick of his ax deeply into the surface ice. It was Bower’s business to keep the rope quite taut both above and below; but the American was sure that he was gathering the slack behind him with his right hand while he carried the ax in his left, and did not use it to steady himself.
Spencer assumed, from various comments by Helen and others, that Bower was an adept climber. Therefore, the passage of a schrund, or large, shallow crevasse was child’s play to him. This departure from all the canons of the craft as imparted by Stampa during their first week on the hills together, struck Spencer as exceedingly dangerous. He reflected that were it not for the words he had overheard, he would never have known of this curious proceeding. Indeed, but for those words, with their sinister significance augmented by Bower’s devilish expression, had he even looked back by chance, the maneuver might not have attracted his attention. What, then, did it imply? Why should a skilledmountaineer break an imperative rule that permits of no exceptions? He continued to watch Bower even more closely. He devoted to the task every instant that consideration for Helen’s safety and his own would allow.
There was not much light in the crevasse. Heavy clouds and the smothering snow wraiths hid the travelers under a dense pall that suggested the approach of night, although the actual time was about half past one o’clock in the afternoon. The wind seemed to delight in torturing them with minute particles of ice that stung with a peculiar sensation of burning. These were bad enough. To add to their miseries, fine, powdery snowflakes settled on eyes and eyelids with blinding effect.
During a particularly baffling gust Helen uttered a slight exclamation. Instantly Spencer stiffened himself, and Barth and Karl halted.
“It is nothing,” she cried. “For a second I could not see.”
Barth’s ax rang out again. The vibrations of each lusty blow could be felt distinctly along the solid ice wall. After a last downward step he would begin to notch his way up the other side, where the angle was much more favorable to rapid progress. Spencer stole another glance over his shoulder. Bower had fully ten feet of the rearmost section of rope in hand. His head was thrown well back. Standing with his face to the ice, he was striving to look over the lip of the schrund. Stampa, feelinga steady tension, must be expecting the announcement momentarily that Barth was crossing the narrow crevice at the bottom. Helen and Karl, intent on the operations of the leader, paid heed to nothing else; but Spencer was fascinated by Bower’s peculiar actions.
At last, Barth’s deep bass reverberated triumphantly upward. “Vorwärtz!”
“Vorwärtz, Stampa!” repeated Bower, suddenly changing the ice ax to his right hand and stretching the left as far along the rope and as high up as possible. Simultaneously he raised the ax. Then, and not till then, did Spencer understand. Stampa must be on the point of relaxing his grip and preparing to descend. If Bower cut the rope with a single stroke of the adz, a violent tug at the sundered end would precipitate Stampa headlong into the crevasse, while there would be ample evidence to show that he had himself severed the rope by a miscalculated blow. The fall would surely kill him. When his corpse was recovered, it would be found that the cut had been made much closer to his own body than to that of his nearest neighbor.
“Stop!” roared Spencer, all a-quiver with wrath at his discovery.
Obedience to the climbers’ law held the others rigid. That command implied danger. It called for an instant tightening of every muscle to withstand the strain of a slip. Even Bower, a man on the very brink of committing a fiendish crime, yieldedto a subconscious acceptance of the law, and kept himself braced in his steps.
The American was well fitted to handle a crisis of that nature. “Hold fast, Stampa!” he shouted.
“What is wrong?” came the ready cry, for the rear guide had already driven the pick of his ax into the ice again after having withdrawn it.
Then Spencer spoke English. “I happen to be watching you,” he said slowly, never relaxing a steel-cold scrutiny of Bower’s livid face. “You seem to forget what you are doing. Follow me until you have taken up the slack of the rope. Do you understand?”
Bower continued to gaze at him with lack-luster eyes. All he realized was that his murderous design was frustrated; but how or why he neither knew nor cared.
“Do you hear me?” demanded Spencer even more sternly. “Come along, or I shall explain myself more fully!”
Without answering, the other made shift to move. Spencer, however, meant to save the unwitting guide from further hazard.
“Don’t stir, Stampa, till I give the order!” he sang out.
“All right, monsieur, but we are losing time. What is Barth doing there?Saperlotte!If I were in front——”
Bower, who owned certain strong qualities, swallowed something, took three strides downward, andsaid calmly: “I was waiting to give Stampa a hand. He is lame, you know.”
Helen, of course, heard all that passed. She had long since abandoned the effort to disentangle the skein of that day’s events. Everybody was talking and acting unnaturally. Perhaps the ravel of things would clear itself when they regained the commonplace world of the hotel. In any case, she wished the men would hurry, for it was unutterably cold in the crevasse.
At last, then, there was a movement ahead.
Barth began to mount. Muttering an instruction to Karl that he was to give the girl a friendly pull, he cut smaller steps more widely apart and at a steeper gradient. Soon they were on the floor of the ice and hurrying to the next bridge. Not a word was spoken by anyone. The fury of the gale and the ever gathering snow made it imperative that not a moment should be wasted. The lightning was decreasing perceptibly, while the occasional peals of thunder were scarcely audible above the soughing of the wind. A tremendous crash on the right announced the fall of another avalanche; but it did not affect the next broad crevasse. The bridge they had used a few hours earlier stood firm. Indeed, it was new welded by regelation since the sun’s rays had disappeared.
The leader kept a perfect line, never deviating from the right track. Helen, who had completely lost her bearings, thought they had a long wayfarther to go, when she saw Barth stop and begin to unfasten the rope. Then a thrust with the butt of herpickeltold her that she was standing on rock. When she cleared her eyes of the flying snow, she saw a well defined curving ribbon amid the white chaos. It was the path, covered six inches deep. The violent exertions of nearly three hours since she left the hut had induced a pleasant sense of languor. Did she dare to suggest it, she would have liked to sit down and rest for awhile.
Bower, who had substituted reasoned thought for his madness, addressed Spencer with easy complacence while Barth was unroping them. “Why did you believe that I was doing a risky thing in stopping to assist Stampa?” he asked.
“I guess you know best,” was the uncompromising answer.
“Yes, I think I do. Of course, I could not argue the matter then, but I fancy my climbing experience is far greater than yours, Mr. Spencer.”
His sheer impudence was admirable. He even smiled in the superior way of an expert lecturing a novice. But Spencer did not smile.
“Do you really want to hear my views on your conduct?” he said.
“No, thanks. The discussion might prove interesting, but we can adjourn it to the coffee and cigar period after dinner.”
His eyes fell under Spencer’s contemptuous glance. Yet he carried himself bravely. Thoughthe man he meant to kill, and another man who had read his inmost thought in time to prevent a tragedy, were looking at him fixedly, he turned away with a laugh on his lips.
“I am afraid, Miss Wynton, you will regard me in future as a broken reed where Alpine excursions are concerned,” he said.
“You were mistaken—that is obvious,” said Helen frankly. “But so was Barth. He agreed that the storm would be only a passing affair. Don’t you think we are very deeply indebted to Mr. Spencer and Stampa for coming to our assistance?”
“I do, indeed. Stampa, one can reward in kind. This sort of thing used to be his business, I hear. As for Mr. Spencer, a smile from you will repay him tenfold.”
“Herr Spencer,” broke in Stampa, “you go on with thesigñorinaand see that she does not slip. She is tired. Marcus Bauer and I have matters to discuss.”
The old man’s unwonted harshness appealed to the girl as did the host of other queer happenings on that memorable day. Bower moved uneasily. A vindictive gleam shot from his eyes. Helen missed none of this. But she was fatigued, and her feet were cold and wet, while the sleet encountered on the upper glacier had almost soaked her to the skin. Nevertheless, she strove bravely to lighten the cloud that seemed to have settled on the men.
“That means a wordy warfare,” she said gayly.“I pity you, Mr. Bower. You cannot wriggle out of your difficulty. The snow will soon be a foot deep in the valley. Goodness only knows what would have become of us up there in the hut!”
He bowed gracefully, with a hint of the foreign air she had noted once before. “I would have brought you safely out of greater perils,” he said; “but every dog has his day, and this is Stampa’s.”
“En route!” cried the guide impatiently. He loathed the sight of Bower standing there, smiling and courteous, in the presence of one whom he regarded as a Heaven-sent friend and protectress. Spencer attributed his surliness to its true cause. It supplied another bit of the mosaic he was slowly piecing together. Greatly as he preferred Helen’s company, he was willing to sacrifice at least ten minutes of it, could he but listen to the “discussion” between Stampa and Bower.
Therein he would have erred greatly. Helen was tired, and she admitted it. She did not decline his aid when the path was steep and slippery. In delightful snatches of talk they managed to say a good deal to each other, and Helen did not fail to make plain the exact circumstances under which she first caught sight of Spencer outside the hut. When they arrived at the carriage road, which begins at Lake Cavloccio, they could walk side by side and chat freely. Here, in the valley, matters were normal. The snow did not place such a veil on all things. The windings of the road often broughtthem abreast of the four men in the rear. Bower was trudging along alone, holding his head down, and seemingly lost in thought.
Close behind him came Stampa and the Engadiners. Karl, of course, was talking—the others might or might not be lending their ears to his interminable gossip.
“We are outstripping our companions. Don’t you think we ought to wait for them?” said Helen once, when Bower chanced to look her way.
“No,” said Spencer.
“You are exceedingly positive.”
“I tried to be exceedingly negative.”
“But why?”
“I rather fancy that they would jar on us.”
“But Stampa’s promised lecture appears to have ended?”
“I think it never began. It is a safe bet that Mr. Bower and he have not exchanged a word since our last halt.”
Helen laughed. “A genuine case of Greek meeting Greek,” she said. “Stampa is an excellent guide, I am sure; but Mr. Bower does really know these mountains. I suppose anyone is liable to err in forecasting Alpine weather.”
“That is nothing. If it were you or I, Stampa would dismiss the point with a grin. You heard how he chaffed Barth, yet trusted him with the lead? No. These two have an old feud to settle. You will hear more of it.”
“A feud! Mr. Bower declared to me that Stampa was absolutely unknown to him.”
“It isn’t necessary to know a man before you hate him. I can give you a heap of historic examples. For instance, who has a good word to say for Ananias?”
The girl understood that he meant to parry her question with a quip. The cross purposes so much in evidence all day were baffling and mysterious to its close.
“My own opinion is that both you and Stampa have taken an unreasonable dislike to Mr. Bower,” she said determinedly. The words were out before she quite realized their import. She flushed a little.
Spencer was gazing down into the gorge of the Orlegna. The brawling torrent chimed with his own mood; but his set face gave no token of the storm within. He only said quietly, “How good it must be to have you as a friend!”
“I have no reason to feel other than friendly to Mr. Bower,” she protested hotly. “It was the rarest good fortune for me that he came to Maloja. I met him once in London, and a second time, by accident, during my journey to Switzerland. Yet, widely known as he is in society, he was sufficiently large minded to disregard the sneers and innuendoes of some of those horrid women in the hotel. He has gone out of his way to show me every kindness. Why should I not repay it by speaking well of him?”
“I shall lay my head on the nearest tree stump, and you can smite me with your ax, good and hard,” said Spencer.
She laughed angrily. “I don’t know what evil influence is possessing us,” she cried. “Everything is awry. Even the sun refuses to shine. Here am I storming at one to whom I owe my life——”
“No,” he broke in decisively. “Don’t put it that way, because the whole credit of the relief expedition is due to Stampa. Say, Miss Wynton, may I square my small services by asking a favor?”
“Oh, yes, indeed.”
“Well, then, if it lies in your power, keep Stampa and Bower apart. In any event, don’t intervene in their quarrel.”
“So you are quite serious in your belief that there is a quarrel?”
The American saw again in his mind’s eye the scene in the crevasse when Bower had raised his ax to strike. “Quite serious,” he replied, and the gravity in his voice was so marked that Helen placed a contrite hand on his arm for an instant.
“Please, I am sorry if I was rude to you just now,” she said. “I have had a long day, and my nerves are worn to a fine edge. I used to flatter myself that I hadn’t any nerves; but they have come to the surface here. It must be the thin air.”
“Then it is a bad place for an American.”
“Ah, that reminds me of something I had forgotten. I meant to ask you how you came to remainin the Maloja. Is that too inquisitive on my part? I can account for the presence of the other Americans in the hotel. They belong to the Paris colony, and are interested in tennis and golf. I have not seen you playing either game. In fact, you moon about in solitary grandeur, like myself. And—oh, dear! what a string of questions!—is it true that you wanted to play baccarat with Mr. Bower for a thousand pounds?”
“It is true that I agreed to share a bank with Mr. Dunston, and the figure you mention was suggested; but I backed out of the proposition.”
“Why?”
“Because your friend, Mr. Hare, thought he was responsible, in a sense, having introduced me to Dunston; so I let up on the idea,—just to stop him from feeling bad about it.”