The big man had climbed out of sight behind a clump of trees, but now he reappeared higher up the slope and not far from the impending mass that was threatening to break down upon the cabin. They saw him prodding in the snow with the staff he carried and knew he was planting the dynamite.
“Good Lord!” groaned Bromley, “why doesn’t he get above it? If he fires it from where he is now, it will catch him, sure!”
“It’s the drift; he can’t get above it—don’t you see how it lips out over his head? Besides, it’s got to be shot from that side. If it isn’t, it will come straight down this way.”
“But, Philip! It’s suicide for him to shoot it from where he is now!”
“It looks that way. But that’s what he is doing. He is lighting the fuses now—don’t you see them sputtering?”
Garth had risen to his feet, but now they saw him stoop again, as if he were adjusting the fastenings of the skis. In the brilliant moonlight they saw, or fancied they could see, the thin, wavering curls of smoke rising from the burning fuses. Still the big man was crouching within arm’s-reach of the blasts he had planted and set alight.
“God in heaven! Why doesn’t he get away from there?” The words stuck in Philip’s throat and became an almost inarticulate cry. Garth was up again and was evidently trying to edge away along the steep snow slope. It was plainly apparent that something had gone wrong with one of the long, unmanageable skis. For two or three of the edging steps he contrived to keep it under him; then it came off and slid away down the slope, and the two watchers saw him fall sidewise, buried to the hip on the side that had lost its support.
With terrifying distinctness they saw him struggle as a man fighting desperately for life. With one ski gone, the other was only a shackle to hold him down. Fiercely he strove to kick the manacling thing off, beating frantically with his bare hands, meanwhile, at the sputtering fuses in an effort to extinguish them before the fire should reach the dynamite. At last he gave over trying to free himself from the one encumbering ski, and struggling out of the snowy pit into which his exertions had sunk him, sought to roll aside out of the path of the impending avalanche.
Given a few more precious seconds of time he might have made it. But the reprieve was too short. Before he had floundered a dozen yards the snow dam holding the huge cliff-top drift in leash leaped into the air like a spouting geyser to the muffled cough of a triple explosion, and an enormous white cataract poured into the gulch a short distance valley-wards of the half-buried cabin.
“Shovels!” Bromley yelped; and together the two horrified witnesses raced up to the tunnel for digging tools. When they ran back they had to wallow waist deep in the yielding mass to reach the spot where the tip of an up-ended ski marked the grave of the buried man; and they had little hope of finding him alive as they burrowed desperately to uncover him.