A few moments, and we halted, so close to the rocky wall, precipitous and broken, that I could have touched it with outstretched hand. How cold it seemed here, how strange that sinister quality (or was it only my imagination?) of the enveloping shadows! "Well," said Milton Rhodes, and I noticed that his voice was low and guarded, "here we are." I made no response. The silence there was as the silence of a tomb. Chapter 13 "I THOUGHT I HEARD SOMETHING" "What," I asked, "is the first thing to do now?" "Find the spot where Rhoda Dillingham was killed. The snowfall of the day before yesterday covered the stains, of course. I feel confident, however, what with the description that Victor Boileau gave me, that I shall recognize the spot the moment I see it. It's over there on the other side, Bill, in the sunlight." "Why that precise spot?" "Because I hope to find something there--something that Victor Boileau himself didn't see." A cold shiver went through my heart. We were so near now. Yes, so near; but near to what? Or had we come too late? "Now for it, Bill!" said Milton Rhodes. He turned and began to work his way down along the base of the rock-wall. The ice now sloped steeply, and, from there to the end of the frowning mass of rocks, and for some distance beyond it, the glacier was fissured and split in all directions. The going was really difficult. Had we tried it without the creepers, we should have broken our necks. One consolation was that the distance was a short one. Why on earth had the artist brought his daughter to this awful place? But, then, there had been nothing terrible about the scene to Dillingham, until the tragedy. As for the appearance of the rocks--yes, I had to acknowledge that--there was nothing intrinsically terrible about it: it was what one _knew_ that made it so. Its sinister, its awful seeming would not have been there had I not known what had happened. We made our way around the end of the rocky pile into the glare of the sunlight and started up the crevassed and split surface there. The slope, however, was not near so steep as the one we had descended on the other side. Sixty feet, and Rhodes stopped and said, looking eagerly, keenly this way and that: "This is the place, Bill. There can be no mistake. Here are the two big crevasses that Boileau described. Yes, it was in this very spot, ten or twelve feet from the base of the wall, that the girl lay when her father came--lay dying, that terrible wound in her throat." He began to scrape the snow away with his steel-soled shoes. A few moments, and he paused and pointed. I shuddered as I saw that stain he had uncovered. "There. You see, Bill?" "I see. Cover it up."