se of the cliffs. Gratton was not a
dozen paces from her. He looked to her like a sick man, gaunt,
hollow-eyed; unkempt, unshaven, as she had never seen him before, he was
like some caricature of the immaculate Gratton of San Francisco. He did
not move but looked at her in a strange, bewildered fashion. Plainly he
had had no knowledge of her being here; he could not explain her
presence; he was every whit as dumbfounded as he would have been had she
dropped down upon him out of the sky. Seeing that he made no attempt to
move, she started to come to him. She was standing upon a rock; she
stepped off into the snow, and in a flash had sunk to her breast. A cry
broke from her as thus, for the first time in her life, she learned
what it was to seek to force a way through deep, loose-drifted snow.
Feather-light in its individual flakes, in mass it made haste
impossible; to push on six inches through it was labour; to come a dozen
paces to Gratton was hard work. She floundered as she had seen him
flounder; she threw herself forward as he had done, and, sinking with
every effort, at last reached his side.

"It's you--Gloria Gaynor!" he muttered. "But I don't understand."

"I came with Mark King. The storm caught us. Just as it caught you. But
you must come with me; if you lie here you will be chilled; you will
freeze. Later we can tell each other everything."

He shook his head. "I can't," he groaned. "I am more dead than alive, I
tell you. I have been living through days and nights of hell; hell
populated by raging demons. I have been since before dawn getting here."
He cast a bleak look up along the cliffs and shuddered. "I'd rather lie
here and die than attempt it."

Once more Gloria was urging and pleading. But in the end she gave over
hopelessly, seeing that Gratton would not budge. And it was so clear to
her that he would perish if he lay here.

"There's a hole in the cliffs just yonder," Gratton said drearily. "God
knows what wild beasts may be in it. But I was going to crawl in there
when you called."

Then Gloria saw for the first time the opening to that cave which in Gus
Ingle's Bible had been set down as Caive number one. It was almost
directly under King's cave, at the base of the cliffs. The snow came
close to concealing it entirely; as it was, just a ragged black hole
showed a couple of feet above the snow-line.

"Come, then," she said. "Let's see if it's big enough for a shelter. It
may do as well as the