Verney, Otto and Barney alone among them fully understood what was taking place. But the others realized instinctively that the tall, dark man on the upper ledge was ordering the woman on the lower to throw herself over the precipice.

Barney drew the pistol he had been lent and aimed it at Lothar, then lowered his arm. At that range even rifles were proving ineffective, and a pistol bullet might as easily have hit Mary as the man who was driving her to her death. He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again Mary had thrown herself sideways and was hurtling into the abyss.

*****

The parties had started upward again. The rifles had ceased to crack. Lothar had disappeared unharmed into the cave. Barney was climbing now as an automaton. Grief and pain filled his mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Instinctively he continued to place his feet in the footsteps of the man ahead and to advance or halt as he was told.

That he should have been robbed of Mary at the eleventh hour caused him a sick misery the like of which he had never before known in all his life. During the past unbearably anxious days he had come to realize that she meant everything to him; that no other woman could ever compensate him for her loss. Almost he had resigned himself to it, believing it next to impossible that the Great Ram would allow her to live after she had thrown the crucifix in his face. Yet he had. Only a few minutes ago she had still been alive, and unharmed. Now she was dead, a broken twisted body grotesquely doubled across some spur of rock, or buried deep in snow, far down below.

The Sergeant rounded a shoulder of the mountain that brought the cable railway again into full view. Suddenly he gave a shout:

'There she is! Blessed God, a miracle!'

The others clambered round the corner after him. He had come out on a humpy ledge of rock broad enough for all his team to stand on. Opposite to them and about ten feet away sagged one of the long swags of triple cable along which the cage of the railway ran. Twenty feet lower down there stood one of the tall T-shaped steel pylons that supported the cables. At the base of the pylon, where snow had piled up, Mary was lying on her stomach, clinging with one arm to the nearest steel strut.

Her sideways lurch as she fell had temporarily saved her. Instead of plunging to the depths she had shot forward beneath the railway terminus platform, hit one of its outer stanchions, checked, slid, bounced, rolled and finally brought up on the drift of snow that had accumulated against the first great pylon some eighty feet below the level of the cave.