uide's face lit up.

"Monsieur Lattery? Is he coming too? It will be the old days once more."

"Coming? He is here now. He wrote to me from Zermatt that he
would be here."

Revailloud shook his head.

"He is not in Chamonix, monsieur."

Chayne experienced his second disappointment that morning, and it quite
chilled him. He had come prepared to walk the heights like a god in the
perfection of enjoyment for just six weeks. And here was his guide grown
old; and his friend, the comrade of so many climbs, so many bivouacs
above the snow-line, had failed to keep his tryst.

"Perhaps there will be a letter from him at Couttet's," said Chayne, and
the two men walked through the streets to the hotel. There was no letter,
but on the other hand there was a telegram. Chayne tore it open.

"Yes it's from Lattery," he said, as he glanced first at the signature.
Then he read the telegram and his face grew very grave. Lattery
telegraphed from Courmayeur, the Italian village just across the chain of
Mont Blanc:

"Starting now by Col du Geant and Col des Nantillons."

The Col du Geant is the most frequented pass across the chain, and no
doubt the easiest. Once past its great ice-fall, the glacier leads
without difficulty to the Montanvert hotel and Chamonix. But the Col des
Nantillons is another affair. Having passed the ice-fall, and when within
two hours of the Montanvert, Lattery had turned to the left and had made
for the great wall of precipitous rock which forms the western side of
the valley through which the Glacier du Geant flows down, the wall from
which spring the peaks of the Dent du Requin, the Aiguille du Plan, the
Aiguille de Blaitiere, the Grepon and the Charmoz. Here and there the
ridge sinks between the peaks, and one such depression between the
Aiguille de Blaitiere and the Aiguille du Grepon is called the Col des
Nantillons. To cross that pass, to descend on the other side of the great
rock-wall into that bay of ice facing Chamonix, which is the Glacier des
Nantillons, had been Lattery's idea.

Chayne turned to the porter.

"When did this come?"

"Three days ago."

The gravity on Chayne's face changed into a deep distress. Lattery's
party would have slept out one night certainly. They would have made a
long march from Courmayeur and camped on the rocks at the foot of the
pass. It was likely enough that they should have been caught upon that
rock-wall by night upon the second day. The rock-wall had neve