bravely, although they would fain
have stopped to skin the bear, but Julian's mandate was peremptory. They
spread themselves along the ridge, at times scraping the loose snow away
in their search for the lost trail.

Suddenly they all slipped and fell, but rose again quickly, laughing.
Then they slipped and fell again, but this time with the startling
consciousness that it was not THEY who had slipped, but THE SNOW! As
they regained their feet they could plainly see now that a large crack
on the white field, some twenty feet in width, extended between them and
the carcass of the bear, showing the glistening rock below. Again
they were thrown down with a sharp shock. Jackson Tribbs, who had been
showing a strange excitement, suddenly gave a cry of warning. "Lie flat,
fellers! but keep a-crawlin' and jumpin'. We're goin' down a slide!" And
the next moment they were sliding and tossing, apparently with the whole
snow-field, down towards the gullied precipice.

What happened after this, and how long it lasted, they never knew.
For, hurried along with increasing momentum, but always mechanically
clutching at the snow, and bounding from it as they swept on, they
sometimes lost breath, and even consciousness. At times they were half
suffocated in rolling masses of drift, and again free and skimming over
its arrested surface, but always falling, as it seemed to them, almost
perpendicularly. In one of these shocks they seemed to be going through
a thicket of underbrush; but Provy Smith knew that they were the tops of
pine-trees. At last there was one shock longer and lasting, followed by
a deepening thunder below them. The avalanche had struck a ledge in the
mountain side, and precipitated its lower part into the valley.

Then everything was still, until Provy heard Julian's voice calling. He
answered, but there was no response from Tribbs. Had he gone over
into the valley? They set up a despairing shout! A voice--a smothered
one--that might be his, came apparently from the snow beneath them. They
shouted again; the voice, vague and hollow, responded, but it was now
surely his.

"Where are you?" screamed Provy.

"Down the chimbley."

There was a black square of adobe sticking out of the snow near them.
They ran to it. There was a hole. They peered down, but could see
nothing at first but a faint glimmer.

"Come down, fellows! It ain't far!" said Tribbs's voice.

"Wot yer got there?" asked Julian cautiously.

"Suthin'