boulder, or in snow-gullies beneath a bulge of ice, when one man struggled above, out of sight, and the rest of the party crouched below with what security it might waiting for the cheery cry, “Es geht.  Vorwaerts!”; the last scramble to the summit of a virgin peak; the swift glissade down the final snow-slopes in the dusk of the evening with the lights of the village twinkling below; his memories tramped by him fast and always in the heart of them his friend’s face shone before his eyes.  Chayne stood for a moment dazed and bewildered.  There rose up in his mind that first helpless question of distress, “Why?” and while he stood, his face puzzled and greatly troubled, there fell upon his ears from close at hand a simple message of sympathy uttered in a whisper gentle but distinct: 

“I am very sorry.”

Chayne looked up.  It was the overdressed girl of the Annemasse buffet, the girl who had seemed to understand then, who seemed to understand now.  He raised his hat to her with a sense of gratitude.  Then he followed the guides and went up among the trees toward the Glacier des Nantillons.

CHAPTER III

THE FINDING OF JOHN LATTERY

The rescue party marched upward between the trees with the measured pace of experience.  Strength which would be needed above the snow-line was not to be wasted on the lower slopes.  But on the other hand no halts were made; steadily the file of men turned to the right and to the left and the zigzags of the forest path multiplied behind them.  The zigzags increased in length, the trees became sparse; the rescue party came out upon the great plateau at the foot of the peaks called the Plan des Aiguilles, and stopped at the mountain inn built upon its brow, just over Chamonix.  The evening had come, below them the mists were creeping along the hillsides and blotting the valley out.

“We will stop here,” said Michel Revailloud, as he stepped on to the little platform of earth in front of the door.  “If we start again at midnight, we shall be on the glacier at daybreak.  We cannot search the Glacier des Nantillons in the dark.”

Chayne agreed reluctantly.  He would have liked to push on if only to lull thought by the monotony of their march.  Moreover during these last two hours, some faint rushlight of hope had been kindled in his mind which made all delay irksome.  He himself would not believe that his friend John Lattery, with all his skill, his experience, had slipped from his ice-steps like any tyro; Michel, on the other hand, would not believe that he had fallen from the upper rocks of the Blaitiere on the far side of the Col.  From these two disbeliefs his hope had sprung.  It was possible that either Lattery or his guide lay disabled, but alive and tended, as well as might be, by his companion on some insecure ledge of that rock-cliff.  A falling stone, a slip checked by the rope might have left either hurt but still living.  It was true that for two nights and a day the two men must have already hung upon their ledge, that a third night was to follow.  Still such endurance had been known in the annals of the Alps, and Lattery was a hard strong man.