He crowded her faster and faster up the incline; he dared not move abreast, it was so narrow.  Sometimes he lifted her bodily, for with every step his panic grew.  Beads of moisture gathered on his face, though the wind stiffened and sharpened; his own breath out-labored hers, and he cried again over and over:  “God Almighty!” and “Almighty God!” Sometimes his tone was blasphemy and sometimes prayer.

But the moment came when she could not be farther pressed.  Her shoulder trembled under his hold, her limbs gave, and she sank down, to her knees at first, then to her elbow.  Even then she moved her head enough to look backward over the abyss.  “The train,” she whispered and, shuddering, dropped her face on her relaxed arm.

Morganstein ventured to glance back.  Ragged fragments torn from the cloud below rose swirling across the opposite mountain top, and between their edges, like a picture in a frame, appeared briefly the roofs of the little station.  But where the Oriental Limited had stood, the avalanche had passed.  “God Almighty!” he repeated impotently, then immediately the sense of this appalling catastrophe whet the edge of his personal terror.  “Come!” he cried; “come, you can’t stop here.  It’s dangerous.  Come, you’ll freeze—­or worse.”

She was silent.  She made no effort to rise or indeed to move.  He began to press by her and on in the direction of that safe spur.  But presently another dread assailed him; the dread of the city-bred man—­accustomed to human intercourse, the swing of business, the stir of social life, to face great solitudes alone.  This cross-fear became so strong it turned him back in a second panic.  Then floundering to keep his equilibrium after an incautious step, he sat down heavily and found himself skidding towards the larger crevasse.  He lifted his alpenstock and in a frenzy thrust it into the ice between his knees.  It caught fast just short of the brink and held him astride, with heels dangling over the abyss.  He worked away cautiously, laboriously, shaking in all his big, soft bulk; and would have given up further attempt to rescue Beatriz Weatherbee had he not at this moment discovered himself at her side.

He had not yet tried to rise to his feet, so safe-guarding himself with the alpenstock thrust once more in the ice, he paused to take the flask from his pocket and poured all that remained of the liquor into the cup.  It was a little over half full.  Possibly he remembered how lavish he had been with those previous draughts, for he looked at his companion with a kind of regret as he lifted the cup unsteadily to drink.  Then, gathering the remnants of his courage, he put his arm under her head, raising it while he forced the small surplus of brandy he had left between her lips.  She revived enough under the scalding swallow to push the cup away.  Anywhere else he would have laughed at her feeble effort to throw off his touch; but he did not urge her to finish the draught, and, as he had done earlier that day, himself hastily drained the cup.  He dropped it beside the empty flask and struggled up.