The slow minutes passed.  Smoke centered his soul on the dull hurt of a hang-nail on one of his fingers.  He should have clipped it away that morning—­it was hurting then—­he decided; and he resolved, once clear of the crevasse, that it should immediately be clipped.  Then, with short focus, he stared at the hang-nail and the finger with a new comprehension.  In a minute, or a few minutes at best, that hang-nail, that finger, cunningly jointed and efficient, might be part of a mangled carcass at the bottom of the crevasse.  Conscious of his fear, he hated himself.  Bear-eaters were made of sterner stuff.  In the anger of self-revolt he all but hacked at the rope with his knife.  But fear made him draw back the hand and to stick himself again, trembling and sweating, to the slippery slope.  To the fact that he was soaking wet by contact with the thawing ice he tried to attribute the cause of his shivering; but he knew, in the heart of him, that it was untrue.

A gasp and a groan and an abrupt slackening of the rope, warned him.  He began to slip.  The movement was very slow.  The rope tightened loyally, but he continued to slip.  Carson could not hold him, and was slipping with him.  The digging toe of his farther-extended foot encountered vacancy, and he knew that it was over the straight-away fall.  And he knew, too, that in another moment his falling body would jerk Carson’s after it.

Blindly, desperately, all the vitality and life-love of him beaten down in a flashing instant by a shuddering perception of right and wrong, he brought the knife-edge across the rope, saw the strands part, felt himself slide more rapidly, and then fall.

What happened then, he did not know.  He was not unconscious, but it happened too quickly, and it was unexpected.  Instead of falling to his death, his feet almost immediately struck in water, and he sat violently down in water that splashed coolingly on his face.  His first impression was that the crevasse was shallower than he had imagined and that he had safely fetched bottom.  But of this he was quickly disabused.  The opposite wall was a dozen feet away.  He lay in a basin formed in an out-jut of the ice-wall by melting water that dribbled and trickled over the bulge above and fell sheer down a distance of a dozen feet.  This had hollowed out the basin.  Where he sat the water was two feet deep, and it was flush with the rim.  He peered over the rim and looked down the narrow chasm hundreds of feet to the torrent that foamed along the bottom.

“Oh, why did you?” he heard a wail from above.

“Listen,” he called up.  “I’m perfectly safe, sitting in a pool of water up to my neck.  And here’s both our packs.  I’m going to sit on them.  There’s room for a half-dozen here.  If you slip, stick close and you’ll land.  In the meantime you hike up and get out.  Go to the cabin.  Somebody’s there.  I saw the smoke.  Get a rope, or anything that will make rope, and come back and fish for me.”