Chayne looked at his watch. It was just four o'clock.
"There has been an accident," he said. "We must hurry."
CHAPTER XXIV
THE BRENVA RIDGE
The peasant was right. He _had_ seen a man waving a signal of distress on
the slopes of Mont Blanc above the great buttress. And this is how the
signal came to be waved.
An hour before Chayne and Sylvia set out from Chamonix to cross the Col
du Geant, and while it was yet quite dark, a spark glowed suddenly on an
island of rocks set in the great white waste of the Brenva glacier. The
spark was a fire lit by Pierre Delouvain. For Garratt Skinner's party had
camped upon those rocks. The morning was cold, and one by one the
porters, Garratt Skinner, and Walter Hine, gathered about the blaze.
Overhead the stars glittered in a clear, dark sky. It was very still; no
sound was heard at all but the movement in the camp; even on the glacier
a thousand feet below, where all night long the avalanches had thundered,
in the frost of the early morning there was silence.
Garratt Skinner looked upward.
"We shall have a good day," he said; and then he looked quickly toward
Walter Hine. "How did you sleep, Wallie?"
"Very little. The avalanches kept me awake. Besides, I slipped and fell a
hundred times at the corner of the path," he said, with a shiver. "A
hundred times I felt emptiness beneath my feet.
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