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"So it's you, is it?" he cried, softly; and then he mumbled things which the little girl could not possibly have understood. Suddenly he sprang to his feet and ran to the door with a word to faithful old Kazan, the leader. From far down the snow-ridge there came the rapid firing of Pelliter's rifle.
When they sat down to the meal, Joanne was facing a distant snow-capped ridge that cut the skyline, and the last of the sun, reflected from the face of the mountain on the east, had set brown-and-gold fires aglow in her hair. They were partly through when her eyes rested on the distant snow-ridge. Aldous saw her looking steadily. Suddenly she pointed beyond him.
In the hundred-yard stretch of gray bloom between the cabin and the snow-ridge he saw three figures speeding like wolves. In a flash the meaning of this unexpected move of the Eskimos dawned upon him. They were cutting Pelliter off from the cabin and his course of flight. "Go it, Kazan!" he cried, fiercely, bending low over the leader. "Moo-hoosh moo-hoosh moo-hoosh, old man!"
"Two parties," explained MacDonald, puffing hard at his pipe. "If there's an outfit behind us they were hid in the timber on the other side of the snow-ridge, and they're pretty close this minute. Culver Rann or FitzHugh, as you call him is hustling straight on with DeBar. Mebby Quade is with him, an' mebby he ain't.
The apex was not a point but a rounded level ridge of snow which curved over on the top of the cliffs like a billow of foam. A tiny black tower of rock stood alone on the northern end of the snow-ridge. "That, mademoiselle, is the Aiguille d'Argentière. We cross the glacier here."
"We don't sleep in a tent during the summer," he said. "Just our blankets out in the open." "But if it should rain?" "We get under a balsam or a spruce or a thick cedar." A little later they stood beside the fire. It was growing dusk. The distant snow-ridge was swiftly fading into a pale and ghostly sheet in the gray gloom of the night. Up that ridge Aldous knew that MacDonald was toiling.
On the third night he saw before him another snow-ridge, too far off to reach without rest, and, tethering his horse in a little crevice between the rocks, he prepared to walk to and fro all night, to keep off the deadly snow sleepiness that he felt coming over him. "Let me but see what is beyond that next ridge," he said, "and I will lie down and die."
Then there rose from the ranks of the Kogmollocks a strange and terrible cry, and in another moment the plain between the forest and the snow-ridge was alive with fleeing creatures in whose heavy brains surged the monstrous thought that they were attacked not by man and beast, but by devils. And in that same moment it seemed that Bram Johnson and his wolves were among them.
"If that snow-ridge lies where I think it does, there's a ravine running down through the neck of the high spur; and once we strike the big dip it's a straight trail to the cache. If we started now we ought to get there to-morrow." He broke off for a moment, and opened the almost-empty bag. "In fact we have to."
A day had followed upon that evening; and thenceforth the image of Sylvia standing upon the snow-ridge of the Aiguille d'Argentière, with a few strips of white cloud sailing in a blue sky overhead, the massive pile of Mont Blanc in front, freed to the sunlight which was her due, remained fixed and riveted in his thoughts.
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