Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 1 (1927-01).djvu/28

 would have the answer. I felt that pocket again. Yes, the revolver was still there!

"Look here!" said I suddenly. Milton, who was on the point of springing across a fissure, turned and looked.

"How does this come?" I wanted to know. "I thought the Tamahnowis Rocks were on the Cowlitz Glacier."

"This is the Cowlitz, Bill."

"But we haven't left the Paradise yet."

"Oh, yes, we have. There is no cleaver between them, no anything; at this place it is all one continuous sheet of ice."

"Oh, that's it. Well, the ice is pretty badly crevassed before us. Glad it isn't all like this."

We worked our way forward, twisting and turning. Slowly but steadily we advanced, drawing nearer and nearer to that dark, frowning, broken mass, wondering (at any rate, I was) about the secrets we should find there—unless, indeed, we were too late. What had Milton meant by that? How on earth could the apparition of the angel and the demon lie in any manner contingent upon the movement of the ice?

Well, we were very near now—so near, in fact, that, if there was anyone, anything lurking there in the rocks, it could hear us. We would soon know whether' we had come too late!

Ere long we had got over the fissures and were moving over ice unbroken and smooth. I wondered if this was the spot where, so many years ago, White and Long had been killed. But I did not voice that thought. The truth is that this terrible place held me silent. And, when we moved into the shadow' cast by the broken, towering pile, the scene became more weird and terrible than ever.

A few minutes, and we halted, so close to the rocky wall, precipitous and broken, that I could have touched it with outstretched hand.

How cold it seemed here, how strange that sinister quality (or was it only my imagination?) of the enveloping shadows!

"Well," said Milton Rhodes, and I noticed that his voice was low and guarded, "here we are!"

I made no response.

The silence there was as the silence of a tomb.

," 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