In a few minutes they were ready. The lightning flashes were less frequent, and the thunder was muttering far away amid the secret places of the Bernina. The wind was rising again. Instead of sleet it carried snowflakes, and these did not sting the face nor patter on the ice. But they clung everywhere, and the sable rocks were taking unto themselves a new garment.
“Vorwärtz!” rang out Stampa’s trumpet like call, and Barth leaped down into the moraine.
CHAPTER X
ON THE GLACIER
Barth, a good man on ice and rock, was not a genius among guides. Faced by an apparently unscalable rock wall, or lost in a wilderness of séracs, he would never guess the one way that led to success. But he was skilled in the technic of his profession, and did not make the mistake now of subjecting Helen or Spencer to the risk of an ugly fall. The air temperature had dropped from eighty degrees Fahrenheit to below freezing point. Rocks that gave safe foothold an hour earlier were now glazed with an amalgam of sleet and snow. If, in his dull mind, he wondered why Spencer came next to Helen, rather than Bower or Stampa,—either of whom would know exactly when to give that timely aid with the rope that imparts such confidence to the novice,—he said nothing. Stampa’s eye was on him. His pride was up in arms. It behooved him to press on at just the right pace, and commit no blunder.
Helen, who had been glad to get back to the moraine during the ascent, was ready to breathe a sigh of relief when she felt her feet on the ice again. Those treacherous rocks were affrighting. They bereft her of trust in her own limbs. She seemed to slip here and there without power to check herself. She expected at any moment to stumble helplessly on some cruelly sharp angle of a granite boulder, and find that she was maimed so badly as to render another step impossible. More than once she was sensible that the restraining pull on the rope alone held her from disaster. Her distress did not hinder the growth of a certain surprise that the American should be so sure footed, so quick to judge her needs. When by his help a headlong downward plunge was converted into a harmless slide over the sloping face of a rock, she half turned.
“I must thank you for that afterward,” she said, with a fine effort at a smile.