eassure the young ladies,
cried out, as he rushed on, hustling everybody: "Keep cool! Keep cool!"
in the voice of a gull, pallid, distraught, one of those voices that we
hear in dreams sending chills down the back of the bravest man. Now, can
you understand those young _misses_, who laughed as they looked at him
and seemed to think it very funny? Girls have no notion of danger, at
that age!..

Happily, the old diplomatist came along behind them, very cursorily
clothed in a top-coat below which appeared his white drawers with
trailing ends of tape-string.

Here was a man, at last!..

Tartarin ran to him waving his arms: "Ah! Monsieur le baron, what a
disaster!.. Do you know about it?.. Where is it?.. How did it take?.."

"Who? What?" stuttered the terrified baron, not understanding.

"Why, the fire..."

"What fire?.."

The poor man's countenance was so inexpressibly vacant and stupid that
Tartarin abandoned him and rushed away abruptly to "organize help..."

"Help!" repeated the baron, and after him four or five waiters,
sound asleep on their feet in the antechamber, looked at one another
completely bewildered and echoed, "Help!.."

At the first step that Tartarin made out-of-doors he saw his error.
Not the slightest conflagration! Only savage cold, and pitchy darkness,
scarcely lighted by the resinous torches that were being carried hither
and thither, casting on the snow long, blood-coloured traces.

On the steps of the portico, a performer on the Alpine horn was
bellowing his modulated moan, that monotonous _ranz des vaches_ on three
notes, with which the Rigi-Kulm is wont to waken the worshippers of the
sun and announce to them the rising of their star.

_It is said_ that it shows itself, sometimes, on rising, at the extreme
top of the mountain behind the hotel. To get his bearings, Tartarin had
only to follow the long peal of the misses' laughter which now went past
him. But he walked more slowly, still full of sleep and his legs heavy
with his six hours' climb.

"Is that you, Manilof?.." said a clear voice from the darkness, the
voice of a woman. "Help me... I have lost my shoe."

He recognized at once the foreign warble of his pretty little neighbour
at the dinner-table, whose delicate silhouette he now saw in the first
pale gleam of the coming sun.

"It is not Manilof, mademoiselle, but if I can be useful to you..."

She gave a little cry of surprise and alarm as she made a recoiling
gesture th