"Well,” Tremaine said, perhaps a little too heartily, “I suppose we'd better go ahead and pick a spot for the plaque. That's what we're here for.” No one replied. Silence, awkward and uncomfortable, hung over the little group. The raw fog-not quite the “mist” Tremaine had had in mind-was sharp in their nostrils, smelling like cold iron.

Gerald Pratt, lighting his pipe, presently looked out from behind hands cupped to protect the flame from the dank wind. A blue woolen guard cap jammed down over his ears made his skeletal face look like a death mask. “So this is where it happened,” he said conversationally.

"Not quite,” Tremaine said, for once glad to hear even from Pratt. “We were on the glacier itself when the avalanche struck. We were crossing this tongue of it, oh, a few hundred yards back. Over there somewhere. It's difficult to say. The snout's moved back quite a bit since then."

Pratt followed his gesture and nodded slowly. “There, you say."

"Of course I don't know about these things,” Shirley Yount said in that maddeningly arch way, as if implying that of course she knew everything there was to know about them. “But if that's where it happened, why don't they put the plaque there?"

"I'm afraid that wouldn't work,” Arthur Tibbett told her. “Glaciers move, you see. In ten years nobody would know where it was."

"And where would you suggest?” Tremaine asked.

The assistant superintendent started. “Me? Well, it's up to you, of course. I wouldn't want to say.” He had been that way all morning.

"Nevertheless,” Tremaine said, “we would value your opinion enormously."