k was the matter with him?"

"Heart," Doctor Waram answered.

"Well, what d'you say? This pedlar and I are social outcasts. And
there is Dagmar in England, weeping her eyes out because of divorce
courts and more public washing of dirty linen. You love her. I don't!
Why not carry this fellow to the _rochers_, to-night after dark?
To-morrow, when I have changed clothes with him, we can throw him into
the valley. It's a good thousand feet or more. Would there be much
left of that face, for purposes of identification? I think not. You
can take the mutilated body back to England and I can go on to
Chamonix, as he would have gone." Grimshaw touched the pedlar with his
foot. "Free."

That is exactly what they did. The body, hidden near the roadside
until nightfall, was carried through the woods to the _rochers du
soir_, that little plateau on the brink of the tremendous wall of rock
which rises from the Rhone valley to the heights near Salvan. There
the two men left it and returned to their hotel to sleep.

In the morning they set out, taking care that the proprietor of the
hotel and the professional guide who hung about the village should
know that they were going to attempt the descent of the "wall" to the
valley. The proprietor shook his head and said: "_Bonne chance,
messieurs_!" The guide, letting his small blue eyes rest for a moment
on Grimshaw's slow-moving hulk, advised them gravely to take the road.
"The tall gentleman will not arrive," he remarked.

"Nonsense," Grimshaw answered.

They went off together, laughing. Grimshaw was wearing his conspicuous
climbing clothes--tweed jacket, yellow suede waistcoat,
knickerbockers, and high-laced boots with hob-nailed soles. His green
felt hat, tipped at an angle, was ornamented with a little orange
feather. He was in tremendous spirits. He bellowed, made faces at
scared peasant children in the village, swung his stick. They stopped
at a barber shop in the place and those famous hyacinthine locks were
clipped. Waram insisted upon this, he told me, because the pedlar's
hair was fairly short and they had to establish some sort of a
tonsorial alibi. When the floor of the little shop was thick with the
sheared "petals," Grimshaw shook his head, brushed off his shoulders,
and smiled. "It took twenty years to create that visible
personality--and behold, a Swiss barber destroys it in twenty minutes!
I am no longer a living poet. I am already an immortal--halfway up the
flower