"Curious," said Garratt Skinner with interest, but with no stronger feeling at all. "Are you in pain, Wallie?"
"Dreadful pain."
"We must wait. Perhaps help will come!"
The day wore on, but what the time was Garratt Skinner could not tell. His watch and Hine's had both stopped with the cold, and the dull, clouded sky gave him no clue. The last of the food was eaten, the last drop of the brandy drunk. It was bitterly cold. If only the snow would hold off till morning! Garratt Skinner had only to wait. The night would come and during the night Walter Hine would die. And even while the thought was in his mind, he heard voices. To his amazement, to his alarm, he heard voices! Then he laughed. He was growing light-headed. Exhaustion, cold and hunger were telling their tale upon him. He was not so young as he had been twenty years before. But to make sure he rose to his knees and peered down the slope. He had been mistaken. The steep snow-slopes stretched downward, wild and empty. Here and there black rocks jutted from them; a long way down four black stones were spaced; there was no living thing in that solitude. He sank back relieved. No living thing except himself, and perhaps his companion. He looked at Hine closely, shook him, and Hine groaned. Yes, he still lived—for a little time he still would live. Garratt Skinner gathered in his numbed palm the last pipeful of tobacco in his pouch and, spilling the half of it—his hands so shook with cold, his fingers were so clumsy—he pressed it into his pipe and lit it. Perhaps before it was all smoked out—he thought. And then his hallucination returned to him. Again he heard voices, very faint, and distant, in a lull of the wind.
It was weakness, of course, but he started up again, this time to his feet, and as he stood up his head and shoulders showed clear against the white snow behind him. He heard a shout—yes, an undoubted shout. He stared down the slope and then he saw. The four black stones had moved, were nearer to him—they were four men ascending. Garratt Skinner turned swiftly toward Walter Hine, reached for his ice-ax, grasped it and raised it, Walter Hine looked at him with staring, stupid eyes, but raised no hand, made no movement. He, too, was conscious of an hallucination. It seemed to him that his friend stood over him with a convulsed and murderous face, in which rage strove with bitter disappointment, but that he held his ax by the end with the adz-head swung back above his head to give greater force to the blow, and that while he poised it there came a cry from the confines of the world, and that upon that cry his friend dropped the ax, and stooping down to him murmured: "There's help quite close, Wallie!"
Certainly those words were spoken—that at all events was no hallucination. Walter Hine understood it clearly. For Garratt Skinner suddenly stripped off his coat, passed it round Hine's shoulders and then, baring his own breast, clasped Hine to it that he might impart to him some warmth from his own body.
Thus they were found by the rescue party; and the story of Garratt
Skinner's great self-sacrifice was long remembered in Courmayeur.
Garratt Skinner watched the men mounting and wondered who they were. He recognized his own guide, Pierre Delouvain, but who were the others, how did they come there on a morning so forbidding? Who was the tall man who walked last but one? And as the party drew nearer, he saw and understood. But he did not change from his attitude. He waited until they were close. Then he and Hilary Chayne exchanged a look.
"You?" said Garratt Skinner.
"Yes—" Chayne paused. "Yes, Mr. Strood," he said.