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Pierre aimed straight for the foot of the buttress, working thus due north. And he was wrong. Garratt Skinner knew it, but said not a word. He stood upon insecure ledges and supported Delouvain upon his shoulders, and pushed him up with his ice-ax into positions which only involved the party in further difficulties. He took his life in his hands and risked it, knowing the better way.

A few spikes in his shoes, some hardtack and cheese with an emergency flask in his pockets, a coil of rope and a small hatchet that might serve equally well as an ice-ax or to clear undergrowth on the lower slopes, was ample equipment, and he was off to reconnoiter the mountainside fully an hour in advance of the packer whom Morganstein engaged for the first stage of the journey.

He balanced this across his open palms for a moment, so that the court might see it then he passed it over to the witness-box. "Now, doctor," he said, "look at that which is one of the latest forms of the ice-ax. Could that wound have been caused by that or something very similar to it?" The witness put a forefinger on the sharp point of the head. "Certainly!" he answered.

Now he disappeared over the edge of a cliff into space, and in a few seconds his voice rang upward cheerily. "Follow! It is safe." And his ice-ax rang with no less cheeriness. He led them boldly to the brink of abysses which were merely channels in the ice, and amid towering pinnacles which seen, close at hand, were mere blocks shoulder high.

But now to come back to the police court the other day: I tell you, I was purposely in a quiet corner, and there I kept till the case was over; but just when everybody was getting away, the man on the bench caught sight of me " "Ah!" exclaimed Mr. Lindsey, looking across at me. "Ah! that's another reason that supplements the ice-ax one! Aye! he caught sight of you, Mr. Elphinstone "

"There will be little sun to-day," he said. "We shall all die here." Garratt Skinner sat down again and waited. The sun rose over the rocks of Mont Maudit, but weak, and yellow as a guinea. Garratt Skinner then tied his coat to his ice-ax, and standing out upon a rock waved it this way and that.

In places it looked precipitous, but there seemed to be no way of working round the flank of the mountain. Then Prescott noticed that the snow was pitted with small holes, about two feet apart, from which he concluded that the prospectors had carried a grubhoe, a tool resembling a mountaineer's ice-ax. He might get up by using these footholds.

Lindsey's fault he let out too much at the police-court. Carstairs was there he'd a seat on the bench and Mr. Lindsey frightened him. Maybe it was yon ice-ax. Mr. Lindsey's got some powerful card up his sleeve about that what it is I don't know.

"You must get some sleep, Sylvia." "Oh, Hilary," she cried. "I shall bring shame on you. We should never have married," and her voice broke in a sob. "Hush!" he replied. "Never say that, my dear, never think it! Sleep! You will want your strength to-morrow." But Sylvia slept little, and before the time she was ready with her ice-ax in her hand.

Garratt Skinner turned swiftly toward Walter Hine, reached for his ice-ax, grasped it and raised it, Walter Hine looked at him with staring, stupid eyes, but raised no hand, made no movement. He, too, was conscious of an hallucination.