Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 1 (1927-01).djvu/29

 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 weird, 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 nearly 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 fewT 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 had 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 Bodeau 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 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. 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 have been 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 that," he said.

"Impossible," I told him.