lieved. No
living thing except himself, and perhaps his companion. He looked at Hine
closely, shook him, and Hine groaned. Yes, he still lived--for a little
time he still would live. Garratt Skinner gathered in his numbed palm the
last pipeful of tobacco in his pouch and, spilling the half of it--his
hands so shook with cold, his fingers were so clumsy--he pressed it into
his pipe and lit it. Perhaps before it was all smoked out--he thought.
And then his hallucination returned to him. Again he heard voices, very
faint, and distant, in a lull of the wind.

It was weakness, of course, but he started up again, this time to his
feet, and as he stood up his head and shoulders showed clear against the
white snow behind him. He heard a shout--yes, an undoubted shout. He
stared down the slope and then he saw. The four black stones had moved,
were nearer to him--they were four men ascending. Garratt Skinner turned
swiftly toward Walter Hine, reached for his ice-ax, grasped it and raised
it, Walter Hine looked at him with staring, stupid eyes, but raised no
hand, made no movement. He, too, was conscious of an hallucination. It
seemed to him that his friend stood over him with a convulsed and
murderous face, in which rage strove with bitter disappointment, but that
he held his ax by the end with the adz-head swung back above his head to
give greater force to the blow, and that while he poised it there came a
cry from the confines of the world, and that upon that cry his friend
dropped the ax, and stooping down to him murmured: "There's help quite
close, Wallie!"

Certainly those words were spoken--that at all events was no
hallucination. Walter Hine understood it clearly. For Garratt Skinner
suddenly stripped off his coat, passed it round Hine's shoulders and
then, baring his own breast, clasped Hine to it that he might impart to
him some warmth from his own body.

Thus they were found by the rescue party; and the story of Garratt
Skinner's great self-sacrifice was long remembered in Courmayeur.

Garratt Skinner watched the men mounting and wondered who they were. He
recognized his own guide, Pierre Delouvain, but who were the others, how
did they come there on a morning so forbidding? Who was the tall man who
walked last but one? And as the party drew nearer, he saw and understood.
But he did not change from his attitude. He waited until they were close.
Then he and Hilary Chayne exchanged a look.

"You?" said Garratt Skinne