Lattery and his guide would have slept the night on
the rocks at the foot of the Blaitiere, they would have climbed all
the next day and at four o'clock had reached within two hundred feet
of the ridge, within two hundred feet of safety. Somewhere within
those last two hundred feet the fatal slip had been made; or perhaps a
stone had fallen.

"For how long did you watch them?" asked Chayne.

"For a few minutes only. My party was anxious to get back to Chamonix.
But they seemed in no difficulty, monsieur. They were going well."

Chayne shook his head at the hopeful words and handed his telegram to
Michel Revailloud.

"The day before yesterday they were on the rocks of the Blaitiere," he
said. "I think we had better go up to the Mer de Glace and look for them
at the foot of the cliffs."

"Monsieur, I have eight guides here and two will follow in the evening
when they come home. We will send three of them, as a precaution, up the
Mer de Glace. But I do not think they will find Monsieur Lattery there."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I believe Monsieur Lattery has made the first passage of the
Col des Nantillons from the east," he said, with a peculiar solemnity. "I
think we must look for them on the western side of the pass, in the
crevasses of the Glacier des Nantillons."

"Surely not," cried Chayne. True, the Glacier des Nantillons in places
was steep. True, there were the seracs--those great slabs and pinnacles
of ice set up on end and tottering, high above, where the glacier curved
over a brow of rock and broke--one of them might have fallen. But Lattery
and he had so often ascended and descended that glacier on the way to the
Charmoz and the Grepon and the Plan. He could not believe his friend had
come to harm that way.

Michel, however, clung to his opinion.

"The worst part of the climb was over," he argued. "The very worst pitch,
monsieur, is at the very beginning when you leave the glacier, and then
it is very bad again half way up when you descend into a gully; but
Monsieur Lattery was very safe on rock, and having got so high, I think
he would have climbed the last rocks with his guide."

Michel spoke with so much certainty that even in the face of his
telegram, in the face of the story which Jules had told, hope sprang up
within Chayne's heart.

"Then he may be still up there on some ledge. He would surely not have
slipped on the Glacier des Nantillons."

That hope, however, was not shared by