And Hendricks yelled after the vanishing figure, ‘Bindy, go slow, go slow! Keep in touch with us.’ But he quickened his pace instantly, as though to overtake the boy. He passed his companion the same minute, and was out of sight. ‘I’ll wait for you,’ came back the boy’s shrill answer through the thinning trees. And a flare of light fell with it from the sky, for the final climb of a steep five hundred feet had now begun, and overhead the naked ridge ran east and west with its line of blazing fires. Boulders and rocky ground replaced the pines and spruces. ‘But you’ll never find the way,’ shouted Leysin, while a deep trumpeting roar of the storm beyond muffled the remainder of the sentence. Hendricks heard the next words close beside him from a clump of shadows. He was in touching distance of the excited boy. ‘The fires and the singing guide me. Only a fool could miss the way.’ ‘But you _are_ a----’ He swallowed the unuttered word. A new, extraordinary respect was suddenly in him. That tall, virile figure, instinct with life, springing so cleverly through the choking darkness, guiding with decision and intelligence, almost infallible--it was no fool that led them thus. He hurried after till his very sinews ached. His eyes, troubled and confused, strained through the trees to find him. But these same trees now fled past him in a torrent. ‘Bindy, Bindy!’ he cried, at the top of his voice, yet not with the imperious tone the situation called for. The sentence dropped into a lull of wind. Instead of command there was entreaty, almost supplication, in it. ‘Wait for me, I’m coming. We’ll see the glorious thing together!’ And then suddenly the forest lay behind him, with a belt of open pasture-land in front below the actual ridge. He felt the first great draught of heat, as a line of furnaces burst their doors with a mighty roar and turned the sky into a blaze of golden daylight. There was a crackling as of musketry. The flare shot up and burned the air about him, and the voices of a multitude, as yet invisible, drove through it like projectiles on the wind. This was the first impression, wholesale and terrific, that met him as he paused an instant on the edge of the sheltering forest and looked forward. Leysin and Lord Ernie seemed to leave his mind, forgotten in this first attack of splendour, but forgotten, as it were, the first with contempt, the latter with an overwhelming regret. For the Pasteur’s mistake in that instant seemed obvious. In half measures lay the fatal error, and in compromise the danger. Bindy all along had known the better way and followed it. The lukewarm was the worthless.