“Guess you hardly expected genuine ice work in to-day’s trip?” he said. “Stampa and I had a lot of it last week. It’s as easy as walking down stairs when you know how.”
“I don’t think I am afraid,” she answered; “but I should have preferred to walk up stairs first. This is rather reversing the natural order of things, isn’t it?”
“Nature loves irregularities. That is why the prize girl in every novel has irregular features. A heroine with a Greek face would kill a whole library.”
“Vorwärtz—es geht!”
Barth’s gruff voice sounded hollow from the depths. Karl, in his turn, went over the lip of the crevasse. Helen, conscious of an exaltation that lifted her out of the region of ignoble fear, looked down. She could see now what was being done. Barth was swinging his ax and smiting the ice with the adz. His head was just below the level of her feet, though he was distant the full length of two sections of the rope. He had cut broad black steps. They did not seem to present any great difficulty. Helen found herself speculating on the remarkable light effects that made these notches black in a gray-green wall.
“Right foot first,” said Spencer quietly. “When that is firmly fixed, throw all your weight on it, and bring the left down. Then the right again. Hold the pick breast high.”
“So!” cried Karl appreciatively, watching her first successful effort.
As Spencer was lowering himself into the crevasse, he heard something that set his nimble wits agog. Stampa, the valiant and light hearted Stampa, the genial companion who had laughed and jested even when they were crossing an ice slope on the giant Monte della Disgrazia,—a traverse of precarious clinging, where a slip meant death a thousand feet below,—was muttering strangely at Bower.
“Schwein-hund!” he was saying, “if any evil befalls the fräulein, I shall drive my ax between your shoulder blades.”
There was no reply. Spencer was sure he was not mistaken. Though the guide spoke German, he knew enough of that language to understand this comparatively simple sentence. Quite as amazing as Stampa’s threat was Bower’s silent acceptance of it. He began to piece together some fleeting impressions of the curious wrangle between the two outside the hut. He recalled Bower’s extraordinary change of tone when told that a man named Christian Stampa had followed him from Maloja.