t. When we start, old horse, we start up. I'm a porous
plaster. I could stick here if it was twice as steep. I'm getting a
sizable hole for one heel already. Now, you hush, and let me work."

The slow minutes passed. Smoke centered his soul on the dull hurt of
a hang-nail on one of his fingers. He should have clipped it away that
morning--it was hurting then--he decided; and he resolved, once clear
of the crevasse, that it should immediately be clipped. Then, with
short focus, he stared at the hang-nail and the finger with a new
comprehension. In a minute, or a few minutes at best, that hang-nail,
that finger, cunningly jointed and efficient, might be part of a mangled
carcass at the bottom of the crevasse. Conscious of his fear, he
hated himself. Bear-eaters were made of sterner stuff. In the anger of
self-revolt he all but hacked at the rope with his knife. But fear
made him draw back the hand and to stick himself again, trembling and
sweating, to the slippery slope. To the fact that he was soaking wet
by contact with the thawing ice he tried to attribute the cause of his
shivering; but he knew, in the heart of him, that it was untrue.

A gasp and a groan and an abrupt slackening of the rope, warned him. He
began to slip. The movement was very slow. The rope tightened loyally,
but he continued to slip. Carson could not hold him, and was slipping
with him. The digging toe of his farther-extended foot encountered
vacancy, and he knew that it was over the straight-away fall. And he
knew, too, that in another moment his falling body would jerk Carson's
after it.

Blindly, desperately, all the vitality and life-love of him beaten down
in a flashing instant by a shuddering perception of right and wrong,
he brought the knife-edge across the rope, saw the strands part, felt
himself slide more rapidly, and then fall.

What happened then, he did not know. He was not unconscious, but it
happened too quickly, and it was unexpected. Instead of falling to his
death, his feet almost immediately struck in water, and he sat violently
down in water that splashed coolingly on his face. His first impression
was that the crevasse was shallower than he had imagined and that he
had safely fetched bottom. But of this he was quickly disabused. The
opposite wall was a dozen feet away. He lay in a basin formed in an
out-jut of the ice-wall by melting water that dribbled and trickled over
the bulge above and fell sheer down a distance of a do