He fastened one end under Joe’s arms.
“You next, Dick, to brace if Joe goes under. Then the rest of you, and I’ll be the rear anchor.”
He made the rope fast around Dick, twenty feet behind Joe, then told Bob and the girls to hold it fast at equal intervals, and fastened the rear end around his own waist
“Now, Joe, let her go,” he said.
Joe went down the rocks, and out on the great snow-field, tilted like the roof of a house. It was soft, as Bob had said, but not like ordinary soft snow. It was more like walking in cold, wet, rock salt, and the footing was anything but sure. Joe went cautiously, slowly climbing upward and outward at the same time, and as he looked below him, down that smooth, glistening, white slope, and realized that if he once got started sliding he would probably go half a mile and shoot off the lower edge into space, he felt his heart, for a minute, go down somewhere into his boots. So he looked up, instead of downward, and felt better.
Everything went well for some hundreds of yards, and the whole party, on their rope, were well out on the great snow-field, when Joe saw just ahead of him a very slight depression in the snow. Bracing with his right foot, he put his left forward, and hit this depression smartly. It caved in! He tried to spring back, yelling to Dick to brace, but his right foot, with nothing but snow for the spikes to hold in, slipped, and he felt himself going down. He had no time to think, only just a terrible flash in his brain of accidents he had read about to Alpine climbers, before the rope caught him under the armpits with a cruel yank; he hung for a minute surrounded by the wet, cold snow which was falling down his neck, and then he felt himself being tugged up again by Dick.
Mills had come up, bringing the rope around Bob and the girls in a loop, by the time Dick had him out.
“Hurt?” he asked.
Joe was poking snow out of his neck, and loosening the grip of the rope under his arms.
“I—I guess not!” he panted. “Gee, that gave me some surprise, though. I thought something was coming, and tested it with one foot, but the other slipped.”