"Ten men have I brought down from these mountains, stone dead," said one, "and this will be the eleventh."
He repeated his lugubrious statement so often, that Gordon found himself in the end humming the words to the cadence of his steps.
They reached the Rock at last, and this mockery of a search began and was kept up all through the freezing night. In the grey of the morning they came down the path again. A man was running towards them with the news that the body had been found, and he led them up to the cliffs on Scafell. Gordon stood by Hawke's side for a moment, as he lay stretched out in a frozen pool of blood, and then turned away sick; for he had noticed about the corners of his mouth a faint blue mark, like a bruise.
"You will carry him down," he said. "I will follow you."
The men understood his feelings, or rather thought they did, and lifted the body gently and bore it down to the village. On the way they passed the glissade on the side of the mountain, and one of them stopped and pointed to the groove in the snow where Gordon had descended.
But he only said, "He will never come down that slide again, poor chap!"
Gordon watched them until they had disappeared round a headland, and then turned and looked down the crags.
"Not there!" he muttered to himself, with a shudder, and crossed over the mountain top down to the screes. He stopped in front of a steep, narrow gully, and far down he could see the quiet waters of the Lake lapping the base of it. He cast one look towards Wastdale. Eastwards the sun was rising over the Pass; "from Keswick," he thought. He took out of his pocket the three letters and handled them, and his eyes fell upon the signature.
* * * * *
Two days afterwards he was found by a fisherman at the bottom of the gully, caught by a boulder on the water's edge. One hand was trailing in the water and it clenched a torn scrap of sodden paper.