It was weakness, of course, but he started up again, this time to his feet, and as he stood up his head and shoulders showed clear against the white snow behind him.  He heard a shout—­yes, an undoubted shout.  He stared down the slope and then he saw.  The four black stones had moved, were nearer to him—­they were four men ascending.  Garratt Skinner turned swiftly toward Walter Hine, reached for his ice-ax, grasped it and raised it, Walter Hine looked at him with staring, stupid eyes, but raised no hand, made no movement.  He, too, was conscious of an hallucination.  It seemed to him that his friend stood over him with a convulsed and murderous face, in which rage strove with bitter disappointment, but that he held his ax by the end with the adz-head swung back above his head to give greater force to the blow, and that while he poised it there came a cry from the confines of the world, and that upon that cry his friend dropped the ax, and stooping down to him murmured:  “There’s help quite close, Wallie!”

Certainly those words were spoken—­that at all events was no hallucination.  Walter Hine understood it clearly.  For Garratt Skinner suddenly stripped off his coat, passed it round Hine’s shoulders and then, baring his own breast, clasped Hine to it that he might impart to him some warmth from his own body.

Thus they were found by the rescue party; and the story of Garratt Skinner’s great self-sacrifice was long remembered in Courmayeur.

Garratt Skinner watched the men mounting and wondered who they were.  He recognized his own guide, Pierre Delouvain, but who were the others, how did they come there on a morning so forbidding?  Who was the tall man who walked last but one?  And as the party drew nearer, he saw and understood.  But he did not change from his attitude.  He waited until they were close.  Then he and Hilary Chayne exchanged a look.

“You?” said Garratt Skinner.

“Yes—­” Chayne paused.  “Yes, Mr. Strood,” he said.

And in those words all was said.  Garratt Skinner knew that his plan was not merely foiled, but also understood.  He stood up and looked about him, and even to Chayne’s eyes there was a dignity in his quiet manner, his patience under defeat.  For Garratt Skinner, rogue though he was, the mountains had their message.  All through that long night, while he sat by the side of his victim, they had been whispering it.  Whether bound in frost beneath the stars, or sparkling to the sun, or gray under a sky of clouds, or buried deep in flakes of whirling snow, they spoke to him always of the grandeur of their indifference.  They might be traversed and scaled, but they were unconquered always because they were indifferent.  The climber might lie in wait through the bad weather at the base of the peak, seize upon his chance and stand upon the summit with a cry of triumph and derision.  The mountains were indifferent.  As they endured success, so they inflicted defeat—­with a sublime indifference, lifting their foreheads to the stars as though wrapt in some high communion.  Something of their patience had entered into Garratt Skinner.  He did not deny his name, he asked no question, he accepted failure and he looked anxiously to the sky.