Time and again, as his eyes would wander to where the yellow light-motes shuttled down through the tree-tops to the snow-cap on the brow of the cliff toward which we toiled, I would hear the quick catch of his breath as, involuntarily, he sucked it in to release it in a ringing whoop of gladness, only--recollecting in time--to expel it again with a wheezy snort of disgust. For the last two or three hundred yards, by humming a plaintive little love lilt through his nose, he hit upon a fairly innocuous compromise which seemed to serve the desired purpose of releasing the accumulating pressure slowly without blowing off the safety-valve. When we finally came out on the unthreatened expanse of the glacial moraine above, he unleashed his pent-up gladness in a wild peal of exultation that must have sent its bounding echoes caroming up to the solitary pinnacle of the _massif_ still in the hands of the slipping Austrians. That afternoon, as it chanced, the _teleferica_ to the summit, after passing the captain and myself up safely, went on a strike while the basket containing the young lieutenant was still only at the first stage of its long crawl, and he had full opportunity to make up, vocally, for lost time. It was an hour before the cable was running smoothly again, and by then it was time, and more than time, for us to descend if we were to reach the lower valley before nightfall. I found my young friend warbling blithely on the _teleferica_ terrace when I crawled out at the lower end, apparently no whit upset by the way his excursion had been curtailed. “What did you do while you were stuck up there in the basket?” I hastened to ask him; for being stalled midway on a _teleferica_ cable at any time in the winter is an experience that may well develop into something serious. I had already heard recitals--in the quiet matter-of-fact Alpini way--of the astonishing feats of aerial acrobatics that had been performed in effecting rescues in such instances, and, once or twice, grim allusions to the tragic consequences when the attempted rescues had failed. “Oh, I just sang for a while,” was the laughing reply in Italian; “and then, when it began to get cold up there, I dropped over on to the snow and slid down here to get warm.” I have not yet been able to learn just how far it was that he had to drop before he struck the snow; but, whatever the distance, I am perfectly certain that he kept right on singing all the way. III