Those below could see his frantic struggles to check his descent as his body shot downward with lightning-like swiftness. A short clump of bushes caught and held him for an instant, then gave way, and they saw him struggling for another hold. Then a shelf of rock caught him. He lay flat for a moment afraid to move, and those below could not see him. Then he sat up and waved his cap, and shouted that he was safe. The awe-struck crowd hardly knew what Phil was doing until she had crossed the ice and begun to climb. While Charles was still crashing downward, she had run to a favorable point her quick eyes had marked and was climbing up a well-remembered trail. The snow and ice had increased its hazards, and an ominous crackling and snapping of twigs attended her flight. "Come back! Come back!" they called to her. Half a dozen young men plunged after her; but already well advanced, she cried to them not to follow. "Tell him to stay where he is," she called; and was again nimbly creeping upward. There was no way to arrest or help her, and she had clearly set forth with a definite purpose and could not be brought back. Cries of horror marked every sound as her white sweater became the target of anxious eyes. The white sweater paused, hung for tremulous instants, was lost and discernible again. A frozen clod, loosened as she clutched at the projecting roots of a young beech, ricocheted behind her. Her course, paralleling that taken by Holton, was about ten yards to the left of it. To those below it seemed that her ascent was only doubling the hour's peril. Charles, perched on the rock that had seemingly flung out its arm to save him, was measuring his chances of escape without knowing that Phil was climbing toward him. As she drew nearer he heard the sounds of her ascent, and peering over saw the sweater dangling like a white ball from the cliff-side. "Go down, Phil! You can't make it; nobody can do it! Tell the boys to get a rope," he shouted. "Please go back!" Already messengers had run for assistance, but the little canon in its pocket-like isolation was so shut in that it was a mile to the nearest house. Along the tiny thread of a trail, transformed by sleet and snow until it was scarcely recognizable, Phil pressed on steadily. Charles, seeing that she would not go back, ceased his entreaties, fearing to confuse or alarm her. Her hands caught strong boughs with certainty; the tiny twigs slapped her face spitefully. Here and there she flung herself flat against the rocky surface and crept guardedly; then she was up dancing from one vantage-point to another, until finally she paused, clinging to a sapling slightly above Holton. When she had got her breath she called an "All right!" that echoed and reechoed through the valley. "You thought you could do it, didn't you?" she said mockingly; "and now I've had to spoil my clothes to get you off that shelf."