Tremaine shook his head. “I'm not sure. I believe they might well be. How horrible, how utterly horrible.” His heart was leaping with joy. It was too good to be true; he couldn't have dreamed up better publicity himself. Perhaps the publication schedule could be moved up to make the best use of it. He would have to call Javelin as soon as "Probably bear,” Pratt said offhandedly. “Plenty of ‘em around here."

Tremaine glared at him. He didn't care for the bear hypothesis at all. “Mr. Tibbett? Do you know?"

"Me?” said Tibbett, who seemed to respond habitually in this disingenuous and annoying fashion. “Well, they could very well be bear, all right. And then again, maybe not. I'm not a naturalist myself,” he finished lamely (and unnecessarily), “I'm more in the administrative line."

"Well, I'm a dentist and I've seen human bones before,” Fisk announced, “and I say those bones are human.” For the first time Tremaine almost liked him.

The matter was settled beyond doubt by Anna Henckel, who had been rooting in the glacial detritus while the others stared at the bones.

"Look,” she said flatly and held out a waterlogged, brown, ankle-height shoe, rotted and misshapen, the lugged sole curling away from the leather upper. “A Raichle boot,” she said.

When nobody, including Tremaine, seemed to grasp the significance of this, she added darkly: “It is the shoe we were outfitted with."

"Still,” said Walter, who seemed thoroughly shaken, “what does that prove? Other people wear Raichles. Anyone could have thrown away a shoe, or-"

Grimly, Anna shook her head. “There is no mistake.” She dipped it so that they could look into the opening in the top. Inside, in a welter of rotten, dirty-gray wool, was a jumble of narrow bones.

Shirley shuddered convulsively. “How can you touch that?"

This was followed by a long, tortured silence, broken at last by the familiar, elegant baritone of M. Audley Tremaine.