"You'll stick till I come!" he told her sharply. "No nonsense!"
Abandoning the hope of reaching her from below, he turned hurriedly to scan the cliffside right and left. And in an instant the practiced mountaineer's eye had devised a path where no path existed. The fissure in which he stood slanted off at an acute angle away from the girl's ledge, but from a higher point an open crack sloped back across the face of the precipice and crossed over the cornice rock directly above her. He calculated the chances, and nodded with sudden confidence.
"Can do!" he said coolly. "How's the footing up there?"
"Narrow," she answered faintly. "I've got to hold on, and my fingers are getting cold."
"Be with you in two minutes," he promised.
The fissure was like an open chute gouged down the side of the cliff, and just wide enough to admit his body. To crawl up that narrow draw with a carbine strapped to his back, however, was out of the question. His teeth clicked suddenly together. He had forgotten about the rifle. It was an impossible encumbrance if he expected to reach the girl. But the only way to get rid of the weapon was to unfasten the sling and let it drop: a sacrifice almost suicidal to a man on winter police patrol. As he hesitated he caught a momentary glimpse of the soft blue eyes that gazed beseechingly towards him. He drew a sharp breath. This was no time to count personal cost. With a decisive movement, his hand reached towards the shoulder strap, but as he touched the buckle some vaguely stirring sense of alarm checked him, and drew his glance towards the height above.
He looked upward, and his jaw fell, and he stared in wide-eyed astonishment. From the brink of the cliff, not thirty feet overhead, a human face was peering down at him.
It was an unwholesome countenance, pinkish in color, evil-smirking, with loose, flabby jowls, flat, broad nostrils, and a pair of elongated slits for eyes. Dexter remembered the rogues' gallery photograph buttoned in his jacket pocket, but he did not need any print to identify the physiognomy he saw now in the flesh. That leering face was unforgettable. The man on the cliff could be none other than the fugitive murderer, "Pink" Crill.