And whatten penance will ye drie for that?

could that accomplice be? It was not until then that the chilling, frightening thought struck me that, because two guns had been used in the plane, I had assumed all along that there were only two criminals. There wasn't a shadow of evidence to suggest why there should not be more than two: why not three? Why not Corazzini, Zagero and Levin all in the conspiracy together? I thought over the implications of this for some minutes, and at the end I felt more helpless than ever, more weirdly certain of ultimate tragedy to come. Forcibly, almost, I had to remind myself that all three were not necessarily working together; but it was a possibility that had to be faced. About three o'clock in the morning, still following the flag trail that stretched out interminably before us in the long rake of the headlights, we felt the tractor slow down and Jackstraw, who was driving at the time, change gear as we entered on the first gentle slope of the long foothills that led to the winding pass that cut the Vindeby Nunataks almost exactly in half. We could have gone round the Nunataks, but that would have wasted an entire day, perhaps two, and with the ten-mile route through the hills clearly marked, it was pointless to make a detour. Two hours later, as the incline perceptibly steepened, the tractor treads began to slip and spin on the frozen snow, but by off-loading almost all the petrol and gear we carried on the tractor sled and stowing it inside the tractor cabin, we managed to build up enough weight to gain a purchase on the surface. Even so, progress was slow and difficult. We could only make ground by following a zigzag pattern, and it took us well over an hour to cover the last mile before the entrance to the pass. Here we halted, soon after seven o'clock in the morning. The pass was lined on one side by a deep crevasse in the ice that ran its entire length, and although not particularly treacherous the trail was difficult and dangerous enough to make me determined to wait for the two or three brief hours' light at the middle of the day. While breakfast was being prepared, I looked at Mahler and Marie LeGarde. The steady rise in temperatureit was now less than -SOThad done nothing to help either of them. Marie LeGarde looked as if she hadn't eaten in weeks, her face, pock-marked with sores and frostbite blisters, was appallingly thin and wasted, and the once sparkling eyes lack-lustre, pouched and filled and rimmed with blood. She hadn't spoken a word in ten hours, just sat there, in her increasingly rare moments of waking, digital prices slim search camera shivering and staring ahead with sightless eyes. Theodore Mahler looked in better case than she, but I knew when his defences went down they would do so in a matter of hours. Despite all that we -or, rather, Margaret Rosshad done for him, the insidious talons of frostbite had already sunk deep into his feet, he had developed a very heavy coldrare indeed in the Arctic, the seeds of it must have been sown before he had left New Yorkand he had neither the energy nor reserves to fight either that or the boils that were beginning to plague him. His breathing was difficult, the sweet ethereal odour of acetone very strong. He seemed wide awake and rational enough, superficially a much better going concern than Marie LeGarde, but I knew that the collapse, the preliminary to the true diabetic coma, might come at any time. At eight o'clock Jackstraw and I moved out on to the hillside, and again made contact with Hillcrest. My heart sank when I heard the grim news that they'd hardly progressed a couple of miles in the previous twelve hours. In that bitter cold, it seemed -and where they were temperatures were all of thirty degrees lower than they were with usheating up an eight gallon drum of petrol, even using stoves, blow-lamps and every means at their disposal, to the point of boiling was a heartbreakingly slow job, and the Sno-Cat gobbled up in a minute all the pure fuel they could distil in thirty times that. Beyond that, there was no news: Uplavnik, which they had contacted less than an hour previously, had still nothing fresh to report. Without a word, Jackstraw and I packed up the equipment and made our way back to the cabin of the tractor. Jackstraw's almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness was at the lowest ebb I had ever seen, he seldom spoke now and even more rarely smiled. As for me, I felt our last hope was gone. We started up the tractor again at eleven o'clock and headed straight into the pass, myself at the wheel. I was the only person left in either the driving compartment or the cabin behind: Mahler and Marie LeGarde, vanished under a great mound of clothing, rode on the dog-sled while the others walked. The tractor was wide, the trail narrow and sometimes sloping outwards and downwards, and with a sideslip into the gaping crevasse that bordered our path nobody inside the cabin would have had any chance of escape. The first part was easy. The trail, sometimes not more than eight or nine feet broad, more often than not opened