The rope was fastened, as he had directed, to a thick column in the upheaval, but it stretched diagonally to the projection on the brink of the crevasse. And it was Alice, not Mose, who steadied it, throwing her weight on it, twisting it on her hands, digging her heels in a shallow cleft, straining back to ease the pressure on the knob. Suppose the support had given way; suppose he had dragged her—this brave girl, all life, charm, loveliness—down to destruction. It was horrible to think of. Horrible. Seeing him safe, she relaxed her hold and drew back, making way for him. She breathed deeply, her chest heaving, and a moisture not of the cloud clung to her lip, her brow in drops. He pulled himself together and got to his feet. He did not speak to her, then; he could not. But he put his hand to his mouth and lifted his voice in a great hail. Kingsley responded, but his "Hello," came faintly, through billows of mist. The calls were repeated. "We cannot wait," Stratton said. "We must follow that rascal’s tracks down, while they last, to the horses." "What made Mose do it?" she asked. "Oh, what made him?" "Why, just Indian, I suppose; or say he was an instrument, self-appointed, of his Tyee Sahgalee. But he shall be punished." He closed his lips over the word, and a heat, like the flash of a blade, leaped in his eyes. But when he took her hands to help her to her feet the look changed. The light returned, yet softened, steady, and currents of tenderness, long pent in the man, surged to his face. Her palms were bruised, cut, cruelly. He lifted them, one, and then the other, swiftly, very gently, to his lips. "You did this—for me," he said. "You could do it—for me." "Of course," she answered quickly, and drew the hands away, "I must have done my best for anyone—for Mose, if things had been reversed. But, if I hadn’t been able, Phil would have come back in time; no doubt he could have seen a better way." She met his look briefly, but long enough for him to fathom the clear depths of her eyes; and suddenly, before her dauntless white spirit, his own soul, for the first time, shrank. It was as though another unsounded abyss yawned between them, that the exigency of this hour could not bridge. They hurried on then, groping and slipping down the glacier, taking Mose’s trail. Sometimes they stopped while Stratton renewed his shout, waiting always for Kingsley’s answer, and they knew when he had crossed the crevasse in safety, and that he followed on to the gorge. They made the rocky knob and finally, out of obscurity, she caught Colonel’s familiar neigh. The call shrilled again, inquiring, peremptory. But when they came to the end of the moraine where they had left the horses, they found them gone. The neigh was repeated once more, coming back faintly, from far across the snowfield. "Mr. Stratton," she cried, "what has happened? Where is Mose going?"