“Eyes front, please,” was the quiet answer.
Under less strenuous conditions it might have sounded curt; but the look that met hers robbed the words of their tenseness, and sent the hot blood tingling in her veins. Bower had never looked at her like that. Just as some unusually vivid flash of lightning revealed the hidden depths of a crevasse, bringing plainly before the eye chinks and crannies not discernible in the strongest sunlight, so did the glimpse of Spencer’s soul illumine her understanding. He was not only safeguarding her, but thinking of her, and the stolen knowledge set up a bewildering tumult in her heart.
“Attention!” shouted Barth, halting and making a drive at something with his ax.
The line stopped. Stampa’s ringing voice came over Helen’s head:
“What is that ahead there?”
“A new fall, I think. We ought to leave the moraine a little lower down; but this was not here when we ascended.”
How either man, Stampa especially, could see anything at all, was beyond the girl’s comprehension. The snow was absolutely blinding. The wind was full in their faces, and it carried the huge flakes upward. They seemed to spring from beneath rather than drop from the clouds. Ever and anon a weirdly blue gleam of lightning would give a demoniac touch to a scene worthy of the Inferno.
“Make for the ice—quick!” cried Stampa, and Barth turned sharply to the left. Falling stones were now their chief danger, and both men were anxious to avoid it.
After a brief scramble they mounted the curving glacier. A fiercer gust shrieked at them and swept some small space clear of snow. Helen had a dim vision of lightning playing above the crest of a great mound on the edge of the ice field,—a mound that she did not remember seeing before. Then the gale sank back to its sustained howling, the snow swirled in denser volume, and the specter vanished.
Ere they had gone another hundred yards, Barth’s hoarse warning checked them again. “The bridge has fallen!” was his cry. “There has been an ice movement.”