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Stampa was looking at her, with mild surprise displayed in every line of his expressive features. "What are you afraid of, sigñorina?" he asked in Italian. She half understood, but her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. Her terror was manifest, and he pitied her. He repeated his question in German.
He had a notion that Stampa would rush straight at him, and give him an opportunity to strike from the shoulder, hard and true. He was bitterly undeceived. The man who was nearly twenty years his senior jumped from the top of a low monument on to the flat coping stones of the wall.
All he realized was that his murderous design was frustrated; but how or why he neither knew nor cared. "Do you hear me?" demanded Spencer even more sternly. "Come along, or I shall explain myself more fully!" Without answering, the other made shift to move. Spencer, however, meant to save the unwitting guide from further hazard. "Don't stir, Stampa, till I give the order!" he sang out.
She had been vouchsafed a glimpse into an abyss profound as that into which Stampa himself peered on the day he discovered three of the four who fell from the Matterhorn still roped together in death. The old man's simple references to the terrors lurking in those radiant mountains had also shaken her somewhat. The snow capped Cima di Rosso no longer looked so attractive.
But she had the tact not to drop the subject too quickly. "If Barth and you agree that roping is unnecessary, of course I haven't a word to say in the matter," she volunteered. "It was rather absurd of me to mention it in the first instance." "No, you were right. I have never seen Stampa; but his name is familiar. It occurs in most Alpine records. Barth, fix the rope before we go farther.
It was no time to pick and choose phrases, yet Helen realized the oddity of the absence of any reference to Bower. One other in the party had a thought somewhat akin to hers; but he slurred it over in his mind, and seized the opportunity to help her by a casual remark. "Guess you hardly expected genuine ice work in to-day's trip?" he said. "Stampa and I had a lot of it last week.
"Stampa was the genius who really unraveled the mystery," he said. "Certainly, I managed to discover, in the first instance, that you had deposited your baggage in your own name. Had all else failed, I should have converted myself into a label and stuck to your boxes till you claimed them at Basle; but once we ascertained that you had not quitted St. Moritz by train, Stampa did the rest.
It mattered not a jot to Stampa that he was usurping the functions of the Church in an outlandish travesty of her ritual. He was sustained by a fixed belief that the daughter so heartlessly reft from him was present in spirit, nay, more, that she was profoundly grateful for this belated sanctifying of an unhallowed love. Bower's feelings or convictions were not of the slightest consequence.
He owed it to Etta to make reparation, and the duty must be fulfilled to the utmost letter. Strong man as he was, Bower nearly fainted. He scarce had the faculty of speech when Stampa bade him make the necessary responses in Italian. But he obeyed. All the time the devilish conviction grew that if he persisted in this flummery he might emerge scatheless from a ghastly ordeal.
Spencer attributed his surliness to its true cause. It supplied another bit of the mosaic he was slowly piecing together. Greatly as he preferred Helen's company, he was willing to sacrifice at least ten minutes of it, could he but listen to the "discussion" between Stampa and Bower. Therein he would have erred greatly. Helen was tired, and she admitted it.
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