. And he was wrong. Garratt Skinner knew it, but said not a
word. He stood upon insecure ledges and supported Delouvain upon his
shoulders, and pushed him up with his ice-ax into positions which only
involved the party in further difficulties. He took his life in his hands
and risked it, knowing the better way. Yet all the while the light
broadened, the great violet shadows crept down the slopes and huddled at
the bases of the peaks. Then the peaks took fire, and suddenly along the
dull white slopes of ice in front of them the fingers of the morning
flashed in gold. Over the eastern rocks the sun had leaped into the sky.
For a little while longer they advanced deeper into the entanglement, and
when they were about half way across they came to a stop. They were on a
tongue of ice which narrowed to a point; the point abutted against a
perpendicular ice-wall thirty feet high. Nowhere was there any break in
that wall, and at each side of the tongue the ice gaped in chasms.

"We must go back," said Pierre. "I have forgotten the way."

He had never known it. Seduced by a treble fee, he had assumed an
experience which he did not possess. Garratt Skinner looked at his watch,
and turning about led the party back for a little while. Then he turned
to his right and said:

"I think it might go in this direction," and lo! making steadily across
some difficult ground, no longer in a straight line northward to Mont
Blanc, but westward toward the cliffs of the Peuteret ridge under Garratt
Skinner's lead, they saw a broad causeway of ice open before them. The
causeway led them to steep slopes of snow, up which it was just possible
to kick steps, and then working back again to the east they reached the
foot of the great buttress on its western side just where it forms a
right angle with the face of the mountain. Garratt Skinner once more
looked at his watch. It had been half-past two when they had put on the
rope, it was now close upon half-past six. They had taken four hours to
traverse the ice-fall, and they should have taken only two and a half.
Garratt Skinner, however, expressed no anxiety. On the contrary, one
might have thought that he wished to lose time.

"There's one of the difficulties disposed of," he said, cheerily. "You
did very well, Wallie--very well. It was not altogether nice, was it? But
you won't have to go back."

Walter Hine had indeed crossed the glacier without complaint. There had
been times when he had shive