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At the very beginning of the climb, the object for which it was undertaken was almost fulfilled, and would have been fulfilled but that instinct overpowered Garratt Skinner, and since the accident was unexpected, before he had had time to think he had reached out his hand and saved the life which he intended to destroy. Along that path Hine was carefully brought to the chalets of La Brenva.
"You think we can do it?" asked Hine, nervously, and Garratt Skinner laughed. "Ask Pierre Delouvain!" he said, and himself put the question. Pierre laughed in his turn. "Bah! I snap my fingers at the Brenva climb," said he. "We shall be in Chamonix to-night"; and Garratt Skinner translated the words to Walter Hine. Breakfast was prepared and eaten. Walter Hine was silent through the meal.
The avalanches kept me awake. Besides, I slipped and fell a hundred times at the corner of the path," he said, with a shiver. "A hundred times I felt emptiness beneath my feet." He referred to a mishap of the day before. On the way to the gîte after the chalets and the wood are left behind, a little path leads along the rocks of the Mont de la Brenva high above the glacier.
It was to the old climbs that Garratt Skinner's conversation perpetually recurred the Aiguille Verte, the Grand and the Petit Dru and the traverse between them, the Col Dolent, the Grandes Jorasses and the Brenva route yes, above all, the Brenva route up Mont Blanc.
The rope was put on; Pierre Delouvain led the way, Walter Hine as the weakest of the party was placed in the middle, Garratt Skinner came last; the three men mounted by a snow-slope and a gully to the top of the rocks which supported the upper Brenva glacier. "That's our road, Wallie," said Garratt Skinner.
Hine's words drummed in Chayne's ears: "Nevertheless he left us all behind." Garratt Skinner: Gabriel Strood. Surely, surely! He replaced the volumes and took others down. In the first which he opened it was the autumn number of nineteen years ago there was again mention of the man; and the climb described was the ascent of Mont Blanc from the Brenva Glacier.
He had actually saved Walter Hine's life on the rocky path of the Mont de la Brenva. There was no doubt of it. He had reached out his hand and saved him. Chayne made much of this incident to his wife. "I was wrong you see, Sylvia," he argued. "For your father could have let him fall, and did not. I have been unjust to him, and to you, for you have been troubled." But Sylvia shook her head.
And so the talk went on and the comradeship grew. But Chayne noticed that always Garratt Skinner came back to the great climbs of the earlier mountaineers, the Brenva ascent of Mont Blanc, the Col Dolent, the two points of the Aiguille du Dru and the Aiguille Verte. "But you, too, have climbed," Chayne cried at length. "On winter nights by my fireside," replied Garratt Skinner, with a smile.
Walter Hine began to take heart; and as the flames blazed up, the six men gathered about it, crouching, kneeling, sitting, and the rocks resounded with their laughter. "Only a little further, Wallie!" said Garratt Skinner, still true to his part. They descended from the rocks, crossed a level field of ice and struck the rock path along the slope of the Mont de la Brenva.
When the cloud passed over no one was visible. The two travellers, with seven guides and porters, had been blown off by the wind and precipitated on the Cormayeur side, doubtless into the Brenva glacier. Despite the most vigilant search, their bodies could not be found. The other three were found one hundred and fifty yards below the summit, near the Petits-Mulets. They had become blocks of ice."
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