at;
the sharpest eyes could not have seen so far. But Chayne believed, and
his heart sank within him. The puppet and Garratt Skinner--what did they
matter? But he turned his eyes down toward Courmayeur. It was Sylvia upon
whom the blow would fall.

"The story cannot be true," cried Simond.

But Chayne bethought him of another day long ago, when a lad had burst
into the hotel at Zermatt and told with no more acceptance for his story
of an avalanche which he had seen fall from the very summit of the
Matterhorn. Chayne looked at his watch. It was just four o'clock.

"There has been an accident," he said. "We must hurry."

CHAPTER XXIV

THE BRENVA RIDGE

The peasant was right. He _had_ seen a man waving a signal of distress on
the slopes of Mont Blanc above the great buttress. And this is how the
signal came to be waved.

An hour before Chayne and Sylvia set out from Chamonix to cross the Col
du Geant, and while it was yet quite dark, a spark glowed suddenly on an
island of rocks set in the great white waste of the Brenva glacier. The
spark was a fire lit by Pierre Delouvain. For Garratt Skinner's party had
camped upon those rocks. The morning was cold, and one by one the
porters, Garratt Skinner, and Walter Hine, gathered about the blaze.
Overhead the stars glittered in a clear, dark sky. It was very still; no
sound was heard at all but the movement in the camp; even on the glacier
a thousand feet below, where all night long the avalanches had thundered,
in the frost of the early morning there was silence.

Garratt Skinner looked upward.

"We shall have a good day," he said; and then he looked quickly toward
Walter Hine. "How did you sleep, Wallie?"

"Very little. The avalanches kept me awake. Besides, I slipped and fell a
hundred times at the corner of the path," he said, with a shiver. "A
hundred times I felt emptiness beneath my feet."

He referred to a mishap of the day before. On the way to the gite after
the chalets and the wood are left behind, a little path leads along the
rocks of the Mont de la Brenva high above the glacier. There are one or
two awkward corners to pass where rough footsteps have been hewn in the
rock. At one of these corners Walter Hine had slipped. His side struck
the step; he would have dropped to the glacier, but Garratt Skinner had
suddenly reached out a hand and saved him.

Garratt Skinner's face changed.

"You are not afraid," he said.

"You think we can do it?" as