The Silent Barrier Part 18

"Hemp is a non-conductor."

"You are willfully misunderstanding me," he retorted.

"No. I honestly believed you felt the rope quiver a little."

"Alas! it is the atmosphere. My compliments fall on idle ears."

Barth interrupted this play of harmless chaff by jerking some remark over his shoulder. "Looks like a _guxe_," he said gruffly.

"Nonsense!" said Bower,--"a bank of mist. The sun will soon melt it."

"It's a _guxe_, right enough," chimed in Karl, who had recovered his power of speech. "That is why the boy was blowing his horn--to show he was bringing the cattle home."

"Well, then, push on. The sooner we are in the hut the better."

"Please, what is a _guxe_?" asked Helen, when the men had nothing more to say.

"A word I would have wished to add later to your Alpine phrase book.

It means a storm, a blizzard."

"Should we not return at once in that event?"

"What? Who said just now she was not afraid?"

"But a storm in such a place!"

"These fellows smell a _tourmente_ in every little cloud from the southwest. We may have some wind and a light snowfall, and that will be an experience for you. Surely you can trust me not to run any real risk?"

"Oh, yes. I do, indeed. But I have read of people being caught in these storms and suffering terribly."

"Not on the Forno, I a.s.sure you. I don't wish to minimize the perils of your first ascent; but it is only fair to say that this is an exhibition glacier. If it was nearer town you would find an orchestra in each amphitheater up there, with sideshows in every couloir.

Jesting apart, you are absolutely safe with Barth and me, not to mention the irrepressible gentleman who carries our provisions."

Helen was fully alive to the fact that a woman who joins a mountaineering party should not impose her personal doubts on men who are willing to go on. She flourished her ice ax bravely, and cried, "Excelsior!"

In the next instant she regretted her choice of expression. The moral of Longfellow's poem might be admirable, but the fate of its hero was unpleasantly topical. Again Bower laughed.

"Ah!" he said. "Will you deny now that I am a first rate receiver of wireless messages?"

She had no breath left for a quip. Barth was hurrying, and the thin air was beginning to have its effect. When an unusually smooth stretch of ice permitted her to take her eyes from the track for a moment she looked back to learn the cause of such haste. To her complete astonishment, the Maloja Pa.s.s and the hills beyond it were dissolved in a thick mist. A monstrous cloud was sweeping up the Orlegna Valley.

As yet, it was making for the Muretto Pa.s.s rather than the actual ravine of the Forno; but a few wraiths of vapor were sailing high overhead, and it needed no weatherwise native to predict that ere long the glacier itself would be covered by that white pall. She glanced at Bower.

He smiled cheerfully. "It is nothing," he murmured.

"I really don't care," she said. "One does not shirk an adventure merely because it is disagreeable. The pity is that all this lovely sunshine must vanish."

"It will reappear. You will be charmed with the novelty in an hour or less."

"Is it far to the hut?"

"Hardly twenty minutes at our present pace."

A growl from Barth stopped their brief talk. Another huge creva.s.se yawned in front. There was an ice bridge, with snow, like others they had crossed; but this was a slender structure, and the leader stabbed it viciously with the b.u.t.t of his ax before he ventured on it. The others kept the rope taut, and he crossed safely. They followed. As Helen gained the further side she heard Bower's chuckle:

"Another thrill!"

"I am growing quite used to them," she said.

"Well, it may help somewhat if I tell you that the temporary departure of the sun will cause this particular bridge to be ten times as strong when we return."

"Attention!" cried Barth, taking a sharp turn to the left. The meaning of his warning was soon apparent. They had to descend a few feet of rough ice, and Helen found, to her great relief it must be confessed, that they were approaching the lateral moraine. Already the sky was overcast. The glacier had taken to itself a cold grayness that was disconcerting. The heavy mist fell on them with inconceivable rapidity. Shining peaks and towering precipices of naked rock were swept out of sight each instant. The weather had changed with a magical speed. The mist advanced with the rush of an express train, and a strong wind sprang up as though it had burst through a restraining wall and was bent on overwhelming the daring mortals who were penetrating its chosen territory.

Somehow--anyhow--Helen scrambled on. She was obliged to keep eyes and mind intent on each step. Her chief object was to imitate Barth, to poise, and jump, and clamber with feet and hands exactly as he did. At this stage the rope was obviously a hindrance; but none of the men suggested its removal, and Helen had enough to occupy her wits without troubling them by a question. Even in the stress of her own breathless exertions she had room in her mind for a wondering pity for the heavily laden Karl. She marveled that anyone, be he strong as Samson, could carry such a load and not fall under it. Yet he was lumbering along behind Bower with a clumsy agility that was almost supernatural to her thinking. She was still unconscious of the fact that most of her own struggles were due more to the rarefied air than to the real difficulties of the route.

At last, when she really thought she must cry out for a rest, when a steeper climb than any hitherto encountered had bereft her almost of the power to take another upward spring to the ledge of some enormous boulder, when her knees and ankles were sore and bruised, and the skin of her fingers was beginning to fray under her stout gloves, she found herself standing on a comparatively level s.p.a.ce formed of broken stones. A rough wall, surmounted by a flat pitched roof, stared at her out of the mist. In the center of the wall a small, square, shuttered window suggested a habitation. Her head swam, and her eyes ached dreadfully; but she knew that this was the hut, and strove desperately to appear self possessed.

"Accept my congratulations, Miss Wynton," said a low voice at her ear.

"Not one woman in a thousand would have gone through that last half-hour without a murmur. You are no longer a novice. Allow me to present you with the freedom of the Alps. This is one of the many chateaux at your disposal."

A wild swirl of sleet lashed them venomously. This first whip of the gale seemed to have the spitefulness of disappointed rage.

Helen felt her arm grasped. Bower led her to a doorway cunningly disposed out of the path of the dreaded southwest wind. At that instant all the woman in her recognized that the man was big, and strong, and self reliant, and that it was good to have him near, shouting rea.s.suring words that were whirled across the rock-crowned glacier by the violence of the tempest.

CHAPTER IX

"ETTA'S FATHER"

Though the hut was a crude thing, a triumph of essentials over luxuries, Helen had never before hailed four walls and a roof with such heartfelt, if silent, thanksgiving. She sank exhausted on a rough bench, and watched the matter-of-fact Engadiners unpacking the stores and firewood carried in their rucksacks. Their businesslike air supplied the tonic she needed. Though the howling storm seemed to threaten the tiny refuge with destruction, these two men set to work, coolly and methodically, to prepare a meal. Barth arranged the contents of Karl's bulky package on a small table, and the porter busied himself with lighting a fire in a Swiss stove that stood in the center of the outer room. An inner apartment loomed black and uninviting through an open doorway. Helen discovered later that some scanty accommodation was provided there for those who meant to sleep in the hut in readiness for an early ascent, while it supplied a separate room in the event of women taking part in an expedition.

Bower offered her a quant.i.ty of brandy and water. She declined it, declaring that she needed only time to regain her breath. He was a man who might be trusted not to pester anyone with well meant but useless attentions. He went to the door, lit a cigarette, and seemed to be keenly interested in the sleet as it pelted the moraine or gathered in drifts in the minor fissures of the glacier.

Within a remarkably short s.p.a.ce of time, Karl had concocted two cups of steaming coffee. Helen was then all aglow. Her strength was restored. The boisterous wind had crimsoned her cheeks beneath the tan. She had never looked such a picture of radiant womanhood as after this tussle with the storm. Luckily her clothing was not wet, since the travelers reached the _cabane_ at the very instant the elements became really aggressive. It was a quite composed and reinvigorated Helen who summoned Bower from his contemplation of the weather portents.

"We may be besieged," she cried; "but at any rate we are not on famine rations. What a spread! You could hardly have brought more food if you fancied we might be kept here a week."

The sustained physical effort called for during the last part of the climb seemed to have dispelled his fit of abstraction. Being an eminently adaptable man, he responded to her mood. "Ah, that sounds more like the enthusiast who set forth so gayly from the Kursaal this morning," he answered, pulling the door ajar before he took a seat by her side on the bench. "A few minutes ago you were ready to condemn me as several kinds of idiot for going on in the teeth of our Switzers'

warnings. Now, confess!"

"I don't think I could have climbed another ten yards," she admitted.

"Our haste was due to Barth's anxiety. He wanted to save you from a drenching. It was a near thing, and with the thermometer falling a degree a minute soaked garments might have brought very unpleasant consequences. But that was our only risk. Old mountaineer as I am, I hardly expected such a blizzard in August, after such short notice too. Otherwise, now that we are safely housed, you are fortunate in securing a memorable experience. The storm will soon blow over; but it promises to be lively while it lasts."

Helen was sipping her coffee. Perhaps her eyes conveyed the question her tongue hesitated to utter. Bower smiled pleasantly, and gesticulated with hands and shoulders in a way that was foreign to his studiously cultivated English habit of repose. Indeed, with his climber's garb he seemed to have acquired a new manner. There was a perplexing change in him since the morning.