surface.

He was rounding the bulging crag with its sparse vegetation when, as he
seemed to have cleared it safely, a sapling that he had grasped for a
moment yielded, and he tumbled backward.

Those below could see his frantic struggles to check his descent as his
body shot downward with lightning-like swiftness. A short clump of
bushes caught and held him for an instant, then gave way, and they saw
him struggling for another hold. Then a shelf of rock caught him. He lay
flat for a moment afraid to move, and those below could not see him.
Then he sat up and waved his cap, and shouted that he was safe.

The awe-struck crowd hardly knew what Phil was doing until she had
crossed the ice and begun to climb. While Charles was still crashing
downward, she had run to a favorable point her quick eyes had marked and
was climbing up a well-remembered trail. The snow and ice had increased
its hazards, and an ominous crackling and snapping of twigs attended her
flight.

"Come back! Come back!" they called to her. Half a dozen young men
plunged after her; but already well advanced, she cried to them not to
follow.

"Tell him to stay where he is," she called; and was again nimbly
creeping upward. There was no way to arrest or help her, and she had
clearly set forth with a definite purpose and could not be brought back.
Cries of horror marked every sound as her white sweater became the
target of anxious eyes.

The white sweater paused, hung for tremulous instants, was lost and
discernible again. A frozen clod, loosened as she clutched at the
projecting roots of a young beech, ricocheted behind her. Her course,
paralleling that taken by Holton, was about ten yards to the left of it.
To those below it seemed that her ascent was only doubling the hour's
peril. Charles, perched on the rock that had seemingly flung out its arm
to save him, was measuring his chances of escape without knowing that
Phil was climbing toward him.

As she drew nearer he heard the sounds of her ascent, and peering over
saw the sweater dangling like a white ball from the cliff-side.

"Go down, Phil! You can't make it; nobody can do it! Tell the boys to
get a rope," he shouted. "Please go back!"

Already messengers had run for assistance, but the little canon in its
pocket-like isolation was so shut in that it was a mile to the nearest
house.

Along the tiny thread of a trail, transformed by sleet and snow until it
was scarcely recognizable, Phil pre