It was Philip who took the skis from their pegs on the wall, but it was the play-boy who cut in quickly to say: “See here, Jim; it isn’t your job to go up there and shoot that drift! Let me have those skis.”
“Like hell I will!” was the brusque refusal. “Didn’t you tell me, t’other day, that you’d never had ’em on? Gimme that powder and fuse.”
“But there’s nothing like this in your contract,” Bromley insisted.
“Contract be damned! You goin’ to stand there chewin’ the rag till that drift comes down and chokes you off? Gimme that stuff!”
“The dynamite will be frozen—it’s frozen now,” said Philip.
“It’ll be thawed out good-and-plenty, time I get up there,” Garth asserted, cramming the coil of fuse into a pocket and opening his shirt to thrust the dynamite cartridges in his armpit next the bare skin. “Open the door and lemme out!”
Bitter cold as it was, they sallied out with him and watched him as he “crabbed” over the drifts sidewise and began the ascent on the nose of the spur. There was nothing they could do. Until the menace of the overhanging avalanche should be removed, it would be a mere flirting with death to try to relieve the cabin roof of its buckling burden. In a few minutes Garth became a shapeless, climbing blot in the moonlight on the bare slope, the muffling deerskin making him look like a clumsy animal. That he could reach the critical point, impeded as he was by the awkward foot-rigging, seemed incredible to the anxious watchers below. Yet without the skis to support his weight, he could have done nothing.
“Th-there goes a brave man, if you’ll l-listen to me!” stammered Bromley between his teeth chatterings. Then: “D-did you say something a time ago about dirty fingernails and such small matters?”
“Don’t!” exclaimed Philip sharply. And after a breath-holding moment: “I’m a cad and a coward, Harry. I let you try to make him turn that job over to you a few minutes ago, and I never said a word: I was scared crazy for fear you’d insist upon the three of us drawing straws for it and the lot would fall to me! That is God’s truth. Now and then I get a glimpse of the real man inside of me, and then I know I’m not fit to live in the same world with you and Jim Garth.”
“Easy,” Bromley deprecated. “After all, if the thing can be done, Garth is the one who can come the nearest to pulling it off. We both know that—and he knows it, too.”