ght by the
dazzling light startlingly near, and those looking could distinguish in
his hand a pick, which, with his right arm extended, he slowly swung up
and up the face of the rock until he should swing it high to hook
through the roots of the pine.

Gertrude asked Bucks who it was that spread himself above his comrades,
and he answered, Dancing; but it was Glover.

Deliberately his extended arm rose and fell in the arc he was
following, higher and higher, till the pick swung above his head and
lodged where he sent it among the pine-tree roots. At the very moment,
one of the men supporting him moved--the pick had dislodged a heavy
chip of granite; in falling it struck his crouching supporter on the
head. The man steadied himself instantly, but the single instant cost
the balance of the upmost figure. With a suppressed struggle,
heartbreaking half a mile away, the man above strove to right himself.
Like light his second hand reached for the pick handle; he could not
recover it. The pyramid wavered and Glover, helpless, spread his hands
wide.

By an instinct deeper than life, she knew him then, and cried out and
out in agony. But the pyramid was dissolving before his eyes, and she
saw a strange figure with outstretched arms, a figure she no longer
knew, slowly slipping headlong down a blood-red wall that burned itself
into her brain.

CHAPTER XXIII

BUSINESS

Cruelly broken and bruised, Young, Bill Dancing, and Glover late that
night were brought up in rope cradles by the wrecking derrick and taken
into the Brock car, turned by its owner into a hospital. An hour after
the fall on the south arete the hill blockade had been broken. With
word of the disaster to nerve men already strained to the utmost,
effort became superhuman, the impossible was achieved, and the relief
train run in on the mine track.

Morris Blood, unconscious, was lifted from the narrow shelf at four
o'clock and put under a surgeon's care in time to save his life. To
rig a tackle for a three-hundred-foot lift was another matter; but even
while the derrick-car stood idle on the spur waiting for the cable
equipment from the mine, a laughing boy of a surgeon from the hospital
was lowered with the first of the linemen to the snow-field where the
three men roped together had fallen, and surgical aid reached them
before sunset.

Last to come up, because he still gave the orders, Glover, cushioned
and strapped in the tackle, was