Picture-Play Weekly (Apr-Oct 1915)

PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY clad for a long tramp through the snow — for the month in which he had taken his departure from the citj was January. At the end of an hour's swinging walk, he was able to notice but little improvement in his mental state. And he had been careful to stop every lifteen minutes, too. and take one of the tablets for his ner^^es with which the doctor had supplied him. The fact of the matter was. Tack was as blue as indigo. He couldn't get away from his thoughts, no matter how fast he walked ; and they were still following the grim train on which they had been started by the receipt of that telegram the night before. As Jack halted, to take another tablet from the little vial in his vest pocket, suddenly he flung up his head in a listening attitude. It seemed to him that he had just heard a faint cry — or was it only the sighing of the wind through the pine boughs overhead? It must have, been the wind — that, and his disordered nerves, which had made the murmur of the branches soiuid like the far-off hail of a human voice — so Jack decided, and he started once more along the white-carpeted traiL But the next instant he stopped short. That tvas a human voice ! There was no mistaking it this time, for no rustling treetops and tangled ner\-es ever combined to produce the distinct word : ■Help !" Jack broke into a run in the direction from which the cry sounded. It had come from somewhere on the left of the trail he was following. Crashing through the brittle underbrush that lay beneath the deep drift of saow beside :he hard-packed trail. Jack parted the boughs of a fir that grew at the top of a sharp declivitv' before him, and peered down. And his heart leaped into his mouth. For there, lying on her side on the glassy surface of a slope that was one solid, shimmering sheet of ice. was a girl. And even as Jack looked down upon her, she lifted her voice in another fearstrangled cr> of "Help !"' and slipped another foot over the slippery surface of the slope toward its edge. It was a sheer drop of more than a thousand feet from the brink toward which she was helplessly sliding to the bottom of the precipice below. Peering down at her between the boughs of the tree, the mystery flashed across Jack's mind of how on earth she had ever got in that precarious position? But the next second he got into action. Qutching the lower boughs of the fir in both hands, he let himself down slowly onto the surface of the slope. It slanted before him to the brink, at whose end lay certain death, as steeply and as treacherously as a slate roof wet with rain — ^and with as little anywhere on its surface to afford a grip or foothold. Still, Jack had thought of a plan whereby he might try to rescue her. At best, it was only a chance. He let the weight of his body come down on one foot, which, as he had hoped, faro'^e through the top crust of that glassy surface. Stepping forward thus, and making his own footholds as he w^ent, he might be able to reach her before she slipped again. Of course, there was the risk that his feet descending through the ice crust might dislodge the whole sheet, and sweep them both to destruction. But that risk Jack was willing to take, when the girl's life depended solely on it. He let go of the tree altogether, and broke through the' white crust with his other foot in advance of the first. Three steps forward he took in this way, and then he gave the girl her first hint of his presence. ■T)on"t crj out or look around" — ^lie forced his voice into cheerful steadi ''Yoi: havs saved my life," said .Maud simply. "I can't say anything else that wouldn't sound trite under the circumstances, can I? Biit 1 should like vou to know that I think vou are a ver\' brave man.""