"I THOUGHT I HEARD SOMETHING"
"What," I asked, "is the first thing to do now?"
"Find the spot where Rhoda Dillingham was killed. The snowfall of the
day before yesterday covered the stains, of course. I feel confident,
however, what with the description that Victor Boileau gave me, that I
shall recognize the spot the moment I see it. It's over there on the
other side, Bill, in the sunlight."
"Why that precise spot?"
"Because I hope to find something there--something that Victor Boileau
himself didn't see."
A cold shiver went through my heart. We were so near now. Yes, so near;
but near to what? Or had we come too late?
"Now for it, Bill!" said Milton Rhodes.
He turned and began to work his way down along the base of the
rock-wall. The ice now sloped steeply, and, from there to the end
of the frowning mass of rocks, and for some distance beyond it, the
glacier was fissured and split in all directions. The going was really
difficult. Had we tried it without the creepers, we should have broken
our necks. One consolation was that the distance was a short one. Why
on earth had the artist brought his daughter to this awful place?
But, then, there had been nothing terrible about the scene to
Dillingham, until the tragedy. As for the appearance of the rocks--yes,
I had to acknowledge that--there was nothing intrinsically terrible
about it: it was what one _knew_ that made it so. Its sinister, its
awful seeming would not have been there had I not known what had
happened.
We made our way around the end of the rocky pile into the glare of
the sunlight and started up the crevassed and split surface there.
The slope, however, was not near so steep as the one we had descended
on the other side. Sixty feet, and Rhodes stopped and said, looking
eagerly, keenly this way and that:
"This is the place, Bill. There can be no mistake. Here are the two big
crevasses that Boileau described. Yes, it was in this very spot, ten
or twelve feet from the base of the wall, that the girl lay when her
father came--lay dying, that terrible wound in her throat."
He began to scrape the snow away with his steel-soled shoes. A few
moments, and he paused and pointed. I shuddered as I saw that stain he
had uncovered.
"There. You see, Bill?"
"I see. Cover it up."
I ran my eyes along the base of the rocks; I searched every spot that
the eye could reach on the face or in the shadowy recesses of the dark,
broken mass, towering there high above us; I looked all around at the
fissured ice: but there was nothing unusual to be seen anywhere.
"Where," I asked, and my tones were low and guarded, "did the angel, if
the angel was here--where, Milton, could the angel and the demon have
vanished so suddenly and without leaving a single trace?"
"There lies our problem, Bill. A very few minutes should find us in
possession of the answer--if, that is, we have not come too late. As to
the vanishing without leaving a single trace behind them, that no trace
was found is by no means tantamount to saying that they left none."
"I know that. But where did they go?"
"Let us," said Rhodes, "see if we can discover the answer."
"I don't think," I observed, "that they could have gone _right into_
the rocks: either Dillingham, as he made his way here to the girl,
would have seen them, or Boileau would have found the _entrance_ to the
way that they took."
"At any rate," Rhodes answered, "we may take that, for the moment, as
a working hypothesis, and so we will turn our attention now to another
quarter. If we fail there--though, remember, ice _moves_, Bill--we
will then give these rocks a complete and careful examination with the
object of settling the question whether the great Boileau really did
see everything that is to be found here."
"And so--" I began.
"And so?" he queried.
"Then they--or it--disappeared by way of the ice."
"Precisely," Rhodes nodded: "by way of the ice. And now you see what I
meant when I reminded you that the ice here moves."
"Yes; I believe that I do, at last. Great Heaven, Milton, what can this
thing mean?"
"That is for us to seek to discover. And so we will give our attention
to these crevasses."
He moved to the edge of one of those big fissures that I have
mentioned, the upper one, and peered down into the bluish depths of it.
I followed and stood beside him.
"It couldn't have been into this one," he said.
"Impossible," I told him.
He moved along the edge of the crevasse, in the direction of the rocks.
I went along after him, my right hand near that pocket which held my
revolver.
"And," thought I bitterly to myself, "this is the Twentieth Century!"
"They could," said Rhodes at length, stopping within a few yards of the
wall of rock, "have gone into the crevasse at this point. Yes, most
certainly they could have done so."
"But where could they have gone to? There is no break in the wall here,
not even a crack."
"Don't forget, Bill, that ice moves."
"If _that_ is the explanation, we shall go back no wiser than when we
came."
"Let us hope," he returned, "that it doesn't prove the explanation.
I have no knowledge as to the rate of the ice-movement here. The
Nisqually moves a foot or more a day in summer. The movement here
may be very similar, though, on the other hand, there are certain
considerations which suggest the possibility that it may be only a few
inches per diem."
"It may be so."
"However, Bill, this speculation or surmise will avail us nothing now.
So let's give our attention to this other crevasse. And, if it too
should reveal nothing--well, there are plenty of others."
"Yes," said I rather dubiously; "there are plenty of others."
"The unusual size of these two," he went on, "and this being the scene
of the tragedy led me to think that it would not be a bad idea to start
the examination at this point. The great Boileau--and I learned this
with not a little satisfaction, Bill, though I may say 'twas with no
colossal surprise--the great Boileau did not give even the slightest
attention to any crevasse. He knew before ever he came up here, of
course, that the girl's death had been a purely accidental one.
"However, let us see what we are to find in this other fissure."
We found it even wider than the one which we had just quitted. And
scarcely had we come to a pause there on the edge of it, and within a
few yards of the rock, when I started and gave a low exclamation for
silence.
For some moments we stood listening intently, but all was silent, save
for the low, ghostly whisper of the mountain wind.
"What was it?" Rhodes asked in a low voice.
"I don't know. It may have been nothing, of course. But I certainly
thought I heard something."
"Where?"
"I can't say. It seemed to come from out of the rock itself or--from
this."
And I indicated the crevasse at our feet.