"An Irish-American. Jim Macniff, and a British revolutionist, Harry Skelton. Others await us on Mount Terrible—Germans in Swiss uniforms."
"You'd better keep an eye on Macniff and Skelton," grumbled Recklow.
"No; they're to be trusted. We nearly caught McKay and the Erith girl in Scotland; they killed four of our people and hurt two others…. Listen, comrade Wolkcer, if a trodden path ascends Mount Terrible, as Skelton pretended, you and I had better look for it. Can you find your way back to where we crossed the wire? The dry bed of the torrent was to have guided us."
"I know a quicker way," said Recklow. "Come on."
The girl took his hand confidingly and walked beside him, holding one arm before her face to shield her eyes from branches in the darkness.
They had gone, perhaps, a dozen paces when a man stepped from behind a great beech-tree, peered after them, then turned and hurried down the slope to where the Swiss wire stretched glistening under the stars. He ran along this wire until he came to the dry bed of a torrent.
Up this he stumbled under the forest patches of alternate moonlight and shadow until he came to a hard path crossing it on a masonry viaduct.
"Harry!" he called in a husky, quavering voice, choking for breath.
"Cripes, Harry—where in hell are you?"
"Here, you blighter! What's the bully row? Where's Helsa—"
"With Recklow!"
"What!!"
"Double-crossed us!" he whispered; "I seen her! I was huntin' along the fence when I come on them, thick as thieves. She's crossed us; she's hollered! Oh, Cripes, Harry, Helsa has went an' squealed!"
"HELSA!"
"Yes, Helsa—I wouldn't 'a' believed it! But I seen 'em. I seen 'em whispering. I seen her take his hand an' lead him up through the trees. She's squealed on us! She's bringing Recklow—"
"Recklow! Are you sure?"
"I got closte to 'em. There was enough moonlight to spot him by. I know the cut of him, don't I? That wuz him all right." He wiped his face on his sleeve. "Now what are we goin' to do?" he demanded brokenly. "Where do we get off, Harry?"
Skelton appeared dazed:
"The slut," he kept repeating without particular emphasis, "the little slut! I thought she'd fallen for me. I thought she was my girl. And now to do that! And now to go for to do us in like that—"
"Well, we're all right, ain't we?" quavered Macniff. "We make our getaway all right, don't we? Don't we?"
"I can't understand—"
"Say, listen, Harry. To blazes with Helsa! She's hollered and that ends her. But can we make our getaway? And how about them Germans waitin' for us by that there crucifix on top of this mountain? Where do they get off? Does this guy, Recklow, get them?"
"He can't get six men alone."
"Well, can't he sic the Swiss onto 'em?"
A terrible doubt arose in Skelton's mind: "Recklow wouldn't come here alone. He's got his men in these woods! That damn woman fixed all this. It's a plant! She's framed us! What do I care about the Germans on the mountain! To hell with them. I'm going!"
"Where?"
"Into Alsace. Where do you think?"
"You gotta cross the mountain, then—or go back into France."
But neither man dared do that now. There was only one way out, and that lay over Mount Terrible—either directly past the black crucifix towering from its limestone cairn on the windy peak, or just below through a narrow belt of woods.
"It ain't so bad," muttered Macniff. "If the Germans up there catch McKay and the girl they'll kill 'em and clear out."
"Yes, but they don't know that the Americans have crossed the wire. The neck of woods is open!"
"McKay may go over the peak."
"McKay knows this mountain," grumbled Skelton. "He's a fox, too. You don't think he'd travel an open path, do you? And how can we catch him now? We were to have warned the Germans that the two had crossed the wire and then our only chance was to string out across that neck of woods between the peak and the cliffs. That's the way McKay will travel, not on a path in full moonlight. Aw—I'm sick—what with Helsa doing that to me—I can't get over it!"
Macniff started nervously and began to run along the path, upward:
"Beat it, Harry," he called back over his shoulder; "it's the only way out o' this now."
"God," whimpered Skelton, "if I ever get my hooks on Helsa!" His voice ended in a snivel but his features were white and ferocious as he started running to overtake Macniff.
Recklow, breathing easily, his iron frame insensible to any fatigue from the swift climb, halted finally at the base of the abrupt slope which marked the beginning of the last ascent to the summit.
The girl, Helsa, speechless from exertion, came reeling up among the rocks and leaned gasping against a pine.
"Now," said Recklow, "you can wait here for your two friends. We've come by a short cut and they won't be here for more than half an hour. What's the matter? Are you ill?" for the girl, overcome by the speed of the ascent, had dropped to the ground at the foot of the tree and sat there, her head resting against the trunk. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing convulsively.
"Are you ill?" he repeated, bending over her.
She heard him, opened her eyes, then shook her head faintly.
"All right. You're a brave girl. You'll get your breath in a few minutes. There's no hurry. You can take your time. Your friends will be along in half an hour or so. Wait here for them. I am going on to warn the Germans by the Crucifix that the two Americans are across the Swiss wire."
The girl, still speechless, wiped the blinding sweat from her eyes and tried to clear the dishevelled hair from her face. Then, with a great effort she found her voice:
"But the—Americans—will pass—first!" she gasped. "I can't—stay here alone."
"If they do pass, what of it? They can't see you. Let them pass. We hold the summit and the neck of the woods. Tell that to Macniff and Skelton when they come; that's what I want you here for. I want to cut off the Yankees' retreat. Do you understand?"
"I—understand," she breathed.
"You'll carry out my orders?"
She nodded, strove to straighten up, then with both hands on her breast she sank back utterly exhausted. Recklow looked at her a moment in grim silence, then turned and walked away.
After a few steps he crossed his arms with a quick, peculiar movement and drew from under his armpits the pair of automatic pistols.
Like all "forested" forests, the woods on that flank of Mount Terrible were regular and open—big trees with no underbrush and a smooth carpet of needles and leaves under foot. And Recklow now walked on very fast in the dim light until he came to a thinning among the trees where just ahead of him, stars shimmered level in the vast sky-gulf above Alsace.
Here was the precipice; here the narrow, wooded neck—the only way across the mountain except by the peak path and the Crucifix.
Now Recklow took from his pockets his spool of very fine wire, attached it low down to a slim young pine, carried it across to the edge of the cliff, and attached the other end to a sapling on the edge of the ledge. On this wire he hung his cowbell and hooked the little clapper inside.
Then, squatting down on the pine needles, he sat motionless as one of the forest shadows, a pistol in either hand, and his cold grey eyes ablaze.
So silvery the pools of light from the planets, so depthless the shadows, that the forest around him seemed but a vast mosaic in mother-of-pearl and ebony.
There was no sound, no murmur of cattle-bells from mountain pastures now, nothing stirring through the magic aisles where the matched columns of beech and pine towered in the perfect symmetry of all planted forests.
He had not been there very long; the luminous dial of his wrist-watch told him that—when, although he had heard no sound on the soft carpet of pine needles, something suddenly hit the wire and the cowbell tinkled in the darkness.
Recklow was on his feet in an instant and running south along the wire. It might have been a deer crossing to the eastern slope; it might have been the enemy; he could not tell; he could see nothing stirring. And there seemed to be nothing for him to do but to take his chances.
"McKay!" he called in a low voice.
Then, amid the checkered pools of light and shade among the trees a shadow moved.
"McKay! It's Number Seventy. If it's you, call out your number, because I've got you over my sights and I shoot straight!"
"Seventy-six and Seventy-seven!" came McKay's cautious voice. "Good heavens, Recklow, why have you come up here?"
"Don't touch the wire again," Recklow warned him. "Drop flat both of you, and crawl under! Crawl toward my voice!"
As he spoke he came toward them; and they rose from their knees among the shadows, pistols drawn.
"There's been some dirty business," said Recklow briefly. "Three enemy spies went over the Swiss wire about an hour after you left Delle. There are half a dozen Boches on the peak by the Crucifix. And that's why I'm here, if you want to know."
There was a silence. Recklow looked hard at McKay, then at Evelyn Erith, who was standing quietly beside him.
"Can we get through this neck of woods?" asked McKay calmly.
"We can hold our own here against a regiment," said Recklow. "No Swiss patrol is likely to cross the summit before daybreak. So if our cowbell jingles again to-night after I have once called halt!—let the Boche have it." To Evelyn he said: "Better step back here behind this ledge." And, when McKay had followed, he told them exactly what had happened. "I'm afraid it's not going to be very easy going for you," he added.
With the alarming knowledge that they had to do once more with their uncanny enemies of Isla Water, McKay and Evelyn Erith looked at each other rather grimly. Recklow produced his clay pipe, inspected it, but did not venture to light it.
"I wonder," he said carelessly, "what that she-Boche is doing over yonder by the summit path…. Her name is Helsa…. She's not bad looking," he added in a musing voice—"that young she-Boche. … I wonder what she's up to now? Her people ought to be along pretty soon if they've travelled by the summit path from Delle."
They had indeed travelled by the summit path—not ON it, but parallel to it through woods, over rocks, made fearful by what they believed to be the treachery of the girl, Helsa.
For this reason they dared not take the trodden way, dreading ambush. Yet they had to cross the peak; they dared not remain in a forest where they believed Recklow was hunting them with many men and their renegade comrade, Helsa, to guide them.
As they toiled upward, Macniff heard Skelton fiercely muttering sometimes, sometimes whining curses on this girl who had betrayed them both—who had betrayed him in particular. Over and over again he repeated his dreary litany: "No, by God, I didn't think she'd do it to me. All I want is to get my hooks on her; that's all I want—just that."
Toward dawn they had reached the base of the cone where the last rocky slope slanted high above them.
"Cripes," panted Macniff, "I can't make that over them rocks! I gotta take it by the path. Wot's the matter, Harry? Wot y' lookin' at?" he added, following Skelton's fascinated stare. Then: "Well, f'r Christ's sake!"
The girl, Helsa, was coming toward them through the trees.
"Where have you been?" she demanded. "Have you seen the Americans? I've been waiting here beside the path. They haven't passed. I met one of our agents in the woods—there was a misunderstanding at first—"
She stopped, stepped nearer, peered into Skelton's shadowy face: "Harry! What's the matter? Wh-why do you look at me that way—what are you doing! Let go of me—"
But Skelton had seized her by one arm and Macniff had her by the other.
"Are you crazy?" she demanded, struggling between them.
Skelton spoke first, but she scarcely recognised the voice for his: "Who was that man you were talking to down by the Swiss wire?"
"I've told you. He's one of us. His name is Wolkcer—"
"What!"
"Wolkcer! That is his name—"
"Spell it backward!" barked Skelton. "We know what you have done to us! You have sold us to Recklow! That's what you done!"
"W-what!" stammered the girl. But Skelton, inarticulate with rage, began striking her and jerking her about as though he were trying to tear her to pieces. Only when the girl reeled sideways, limp and deathly white under his fury, did he find his voice, or the hoarse unhuman rags of it:
"Damn you!" he gasped, "you'll sell me out, will you? I'll show you! I'll fix you, you dirty slut—"
Suddenly he started up the path to the summit dragging the half-conscious girl. Macniff ran along on the other side to help.
"Wot y' goin' to do with her, Harry?" he panted. "I ain't got no stomach for scraggin' her. I ain't for no knifin'. W'y don't you shove her off the top?"
But Skelton strode on, half-dragging the girl, and muttering that she had sold him and that he knew how to "fix" a girl who double-crossed him.
And now the gaunt, black Crucifix came into view, stark against the paling eastern sky with its life-sized piteous figure hanging there under the crown of thorns.
Macniff looked up at the carved wooden image, then, at a word from Skelton, dropped the girl's limp arm.
The girl opened her eyes and stood swaying there, dazed.
Skelton began to laugh in an unearthly way: "Where the hell are you Germans?" he called out. "Come out of your holes, damn you. Here's one of your own kind who's sold us all out to the Yankees!"
Twice the girl tried to speak but Skelton shook the voice out of her quivering lips as a shadowy figure rose from the scrubby growth behind the Crucifix. Then another rose, another, and many others looming against the sky.
Macniff had begun to speak in German as they drew around him. Presently Skelton broke in furiously:
"All right, then! That's the case. She sold us. She sold ME! But she's German. And it's your business. But if you Germans will listen to me you'll shove her against that pile of rocks and shoot her."
The girl had begun to cry now: "It's a lie! It's a lie!" she sobbed. "If it was Recklow who talked to me I didn't know it. I thought he was one of us, Harry! Don't go away! For God's sake, don't leave me with those men—"
Macniff sneered as he slouched by her: "They're Germans, ain't they? Wot are you squealin' for?"
"Harry! Harry!" she wailed—for her own countrymen had her now, held her fast, thrust a dozen pig-eyed scowling visages close to hers, muttering, making animal sounds at her.
Once she screamed. But Skelton seated himself on a rock, his back toward her, his head buried in his hands.
To his dull, throbbing ears came now only the heavy trample of boots among the rocks, guttural noises, a wrenching sound, then the clatter of rolling stones.
Macniff, squatting beside him, muttered uneasily, speculating upon what was being done behind him. But with German justice upon a German he had no desire to interfere, and he had no stomach to witness it, either.
"Why don't they shoot her and be done?" he murmured huskily. And, later: "I can't make out what they're doing. Can you, Harry?"
But Skelton neither answered nor stirred. After a while he rose, not looking around, and strode off down the eastern slope, his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. Macniff slouched after him, listening for the end.
They had gone a mile, perhaps, when Skelton's agonised voice burst its barriers: "I couldn't—I couldn't stand it—to hear the shots!"
"I ain't heard no shots," remarked Macniff.
There had been no shots fired….
And now in the ghastly light of dawn the Germans on Mount Terrible continued methodically the course of German justice.
Two of them, burly, huge-fisted, wrenched the Christ from the weather-beaten Crucifix which they had uprooted from the summit of its ancient cairn of rocks, and pulled out the rusty spike-like nails.
The girl was already half dead when they laid her on the Crucifix and nailed her there. After they had raised the cross and set it on the summit she opened her eyes.
Several of the Germans laughed, and one of them threw pebbles at her until she died.
Just before sunrise they went down to explore the neck of woods, but found nobody. The Americans had been gone for a long time. So they went back to the cross where the dead girl hung naked against the sky and wrote on a bit of paper:
"Here hangs an enemy of Germany."
And, the Swiss patrol being nearly due, they scattered, moving off singly, through the forest toward the frontier of the great German Empire.
A little later the east turned gold and the first sunbeam touched the Crucifix on Mount Terrible.
CHAPTER VII
THE FORBIDDEN FOREST
When the news of a Hun atrocity committed on Swiss territory was flashed to Berne, the Federal Assembly instantly suppressed it and went into secret session. Followed another session, in camera, of the Federal Council, whose seven members sat all night long envisaging war with haggard faces. And something worse than war when they remembered the Forbidden Forest and the phantom Canton of Les Errues.
For war between the Swiss Republic and the Hun seemed very, very near during that ten days in Berne, and neither the National Council nor the Council of the States in joint and in separate consultation could see anything except a dreadful repetition of that eruption of barbarians which had overwhelmed the land in 400 A. D. till every pass and valley vomited German savages. And even more than that they feared the terrible reckoning with the nation and with civilisation when war laid naked the heart-breaking secret of the Forbidden Forest of Les Errues.
No! War could not be. A catastrophe more vital than war threatened Switzerland—the world—wide revelation of a secret which, exposed, would throw all civilisation into righteous fury and the Swiss Republic itself into revolution.
And this sinister, hidden thing which must deter Switzerland from declaring war against the Boche was a part of the Great Secret: and a man and a woman in the Secret Service of the United States, lying hidden among the forests below the white shoulder of Mount Thusis, were beginning to guess more about that secret than either of them had dared to imagine.
There where they lay together side by side among Alpine roses in full bloom—there on the crag's edge, watching the Swiss soldiery below combing the flanks of Mount Terrible for the perpetrators of that hellish murder at the shrine, these two people could see the Via Mala which had been the Via Crucis—the tragic Golgotha for that poor girl Helsa Kampf.
They could almost see the gaunt, black cross itself from which the brutish Boches had kicked the carved and weather-beaten figure of Christ in order to nail to the massive cross the living hands and feet of that half-senseless girl whom they supposed had betrayed them.
The man lying there on the edge of the chasm was Kay McKay; the girl stretched on her stomach beside him was Evelyn Erith.
All that day they watched the Swiss soldiers searching Mount Terrible; saw a red fox steal from the lower thickets and bolt between the legs of the beaters who swung their rifle-butts at the streak of ruddy fur; saw little mountain birds scatter into flight, so closely and minutely the soldiers searched; saw even a big auerhahn burst into thunderous flight from the ferns to a pine and from the pine out across the terrific depths of space below the white shoulder of Thusis. At night the Swiss camp-fires glimmered on the rocks of Mount Terrible while, fireless, McKay and Miss Erith lay in their blankets under heaps of dead leaves on the knees of Thusis, cold as the moon that silvered their forest beds.
But it was the last of the soldiery on Mount Terrible; for dawn revealed their dead fire and a summit untenanted save by the stark and phantom crucifix looming through rising mists.
Evelyn Erith still slept; McKay fed the three carrier-pigeons, washed himself at the snow-rill in the woods, then went over to the crag's gritty edge under which for three days now the ghoulish clamour of a lammergeier had seldom ceased. And now, as McKay peered down, two stein-adlers came flapping to the shelf on which hung something that seemed to flutter at times like a shred of cloth stirred by the abyss winds.
The lammergeier, huge and horrible with scarlet eyes ablaze, came out on the shelf of rock and yelped at the great rock-eagles; but, if something indeed lay dead there, possibly it was enough for all—or perhaps the vulture-like bird was too heavily gorged to offer battle. McKay saw the rock-eagles alight heavily on the shelf, then, squealing defiance, hulk forward, undeterred by the hobgoblin tumult of the lammergeier.
McKay leaned over the gulf as far as he dared. He could get down to the shelf; he was now convinced of that. Only fear of being seen by the soldiers on Mount Terrible had hitherto prevented him.
Rope and steel-shod stick aided him. Sapling and shrub stood loyally as his allies. The rock-eagles heard him coming and launched themselves overboard into the depthless sea of air; the lammergeier, a huge, foul mass of distended feathers, glared at him out of blazing scarlet eyes; and all around was his vomit and casting in a mass of bloody human bones and shreds of clothing.
And it was in that nauseating place of peril, confronting the grisly thing that might have hurled him outward into space with one wing-blow had it not been clogged with human flesh and incapable, that McKay reached for the remnants of the dead Hun's clothing and, facing the feathered horror, searched for evidence and information.
Never had he been so afraid; never had he so loathed a living creature as this unclean and spectral thing that sat gibbering and voiding filth at him—the ghastly symbol of the Hunnish empire itself befouling the clean-picked bones of the planet it was dismembering.
He had his pistol but dared not fire, not knowing what ears across the gorge might hear the shot, not knowing either whether the death-agonies of the enormous thing might hurl him a thousand feet to annihilation.
So he took what he found in the rags of clothing and climbed back as slowly and stealthily as he had come.
And found Miss Erith cross-legged on the dead leaves braiding her yellow hair in the first sun-rays.
Tethered by long cords attached to anklets over one leg the three pigeons walked busily around under the trees gorging themselves on last year's mast.
That afternoon they dared light a fire and made soup from the beef tablets in their packs—the first warm food they had tasted in a week.
A declining sun painted the crags in raw splendour; valleys were already dusky; a vast stretch of misty glory beyond the world of mountains to the north was Alsace; southward there was no end to the myriad snowy summits, cloud-like, piled along the horizon. The brief meal ended.
McKay set a pannikin of water to boil and returned to his yellow-haired comrade. Like some slim Swiss youth—some boy mountaineer—and clothed like one, Miss Erith sat at the foot of a tree in the ruddy sunlight studying once more the papers which McKay had discovered that morning among the bloody debris on the shelf of rock.
As he came up he knew he had never seen anything as pretty in his life, but he did not say so. Any hint of sentiment that might have budded had been left behind when they crossed the Swiss wire beyond Delle. An enforced intimacy such as theirs tended to sober them both; and if at times it preoccupied them, that was an added reason not only to ignore it but also to conceal any effort it might entail to take amiably but indifferently a situation foreseen, deliberately embraced, yet scarcely entirely discounted.
The girl was so pretty in her youth's clothing; her delicate ankles and white knees bare between the conventional thigh-length of green embossed leather breeches, rough green stockings, and fleece-lined hob-nailed shoes. And over the boy's shirt the mountaineer's frieze jacket!—with staghorn buttons. And the rough wool cuff fell on the hands of a duchess!—pistols at either hip, and a murderous Bavarian knife in front.
Glancing up at him where he stood under the red pine beside her: "I'll do the dishes presently," she said.
"I'll do them," he remarked, his eyes involuntarily seeking her hands.
A pink flush grew on her weather-tanned face—or perhaps it was the reddening sunlight stealing through some velvet piny space in the forest barrier. If it was a slight blush in recognition of his admiration she wondered at her capacity for blushing. However, Marie Antoinette coloured from temple to throat on the scaffold. But the girl knew that the poor Queen's fate was an enviable one compared to what awaited her if she fell into the hands of the Hun.
McKay seated himself near her. The sunny silence of the mountains was intense. Over a mass of alpine wild flowers hanging heavy and fragrant between rocky clefts two very large and intensely white butterflies fought a fairy battle for the favours of a third—a dainty, bewildering creature, clinging to an unopened bud, its snowy wings a-quiver.
The girl's golden eyes noted the pretty courtship, and her side glance rested on the little bride to be with an odd, indefinite curiosity, partly interrogative, partly disdainful.
It seemed odd to the girl that in this Alpine solitude life should be encountered at all. And as for life's emotions, the frail, frivolous, ephemeral fury of these white-winged ghosts of daylight, embattled and all tremulous with passion, seemed exquisitely amazing to her here between the chaste and icy immobility of white-veiled peaks and the terrific twilight of the world's depths below.
McKay, studying the papers, glanced up at Miss Erith. A bar of rosy sunset light slanted almost level between them.
"There seems to be," he said slowly, "only one explanation for what you and I read here. The Boche has had his filthy fist on the throat of Switzerland for fifty years."
"And what is 'Les Errues' to which these documents continually refer?" asked the girl.
"Les Errues is the twenty-seventh canton of Switzerland. It is the strip of forest and crag which includes all the northeastern region below Mount Terrible. It is a canton, a secret canton unrepresented in the Federal Assembly—a region without human population—a secret slice of Swiss wilderness OWNED BY GERMANY!"
"Kay, do you believe that?"
"I am sure of it now. It is that wilderness into which I stumbled. It overlooks the terrain in Alsace where for fifty years the Hun has been busy day and night with his sinister, occult operations. Its entrance, if there be any save by the way of avalanches—the way I entered—must be guarded by the Huns; its only exit into Hunland. That is Les Errues. That is the region which masks the Great Secret of the Hun."
He dropped the papers and, clasping his knees in his arms, sat staring out into the infernal blaze of sunset.
"The world," he said slowly, "pays little attention to that agglomeration of cantons called Switzerland. The few among us who know anything about its government might recollect that there are twenty-six cantons—the list begins, Aargau, Appenzell, Ausser-Rhoden, Inner-Rhoden—you may remember—and ends with Valais, Vaud, Zug, and Zurich. And Les Errues is the twenty-seventh canton!"
"Yes," said the girl in a low voice, "the evidence lies at your feet."
"Surely, surely," he muttered, his fixed gaze lost on the crimson celestial conflagration. She said, thinking aloud, and her clear eyes on him:
"Then, of the Great Secret, we have learned this much anyway—that there exists in Switzerland a secret canton called Les Errues; that it is practically Hun territory; that it masks what they call their Great Secret; that their ownership or domination of Les Errues is probably a price paid secretly by the Swiss government for its national freedom and that this arrangement is absolutely unknown to anybody in the world outside of the Imperial Hun government and the few Swiss who have inherited, politically, a terrible knowledge of this bargain dating back, probably, from 1870."
"That is the situation we are confronting," admitted McKay calmly.
She said with perfect simplicity: "Of course we must go into Les Errues."
"Of course, comrade. How?"
He had no plan—could have none. She knew it. Her question was merely meant to convey to him a subtle confirmation of her loyalty and courage. She scarcely expected to escape a dreadful fate on this quest—did not quite see how either of them could really hope to come out alive. But that they could discover the Great Secret of the Hun, and convey to the world by means of their pigeons some details of the discovery, she felt reasonably certain. She had much faith in the arrangements they had made to do this.
"One thing worries me a lot," remarked McKay pleasantly.
"Food supply?"
He nodded.
She said: "Now that the Boche have left Mount Terrible—except that wretched creature whose bones lie on the shelf below—we might venture to kill whatever game we can find."
"I'm going to," he said. "The Swiss troops have cleared out. I've got to risk it. Of course, down there in Les Errues, some Hun guarding some secret chamois trail into the forbidden wilderness may hear our shots."
"We shall have to take that chance," she remarked.
He said in the low, quiet voice which always thrilled her a little: "You poor child—you are hungry."
"So are you, Kay."
"Hungry? These rations act like cocktails: I could barbecue a roebuck and finish him with you at one sitting!"
"Monsieur et Madame Gargantua," she mocked him with her enchanting laughter. Then, wistful: "Kay, did you see that very fat and saucy auerhahn which the Swiss soldiers scared out of the pines down there?"
"I did," said McKay. "My mouth watered."
"He was quite as big as a wild turkey," sighed the girl.
"They're devils to get," said McKay, "and with only a pistol—well, anyway we'll try to-night. Did you mark that bird?"
"Mark him?"
"Yes; mark him down?"
She shook her pretty head.
"Well, I did," grinned McKay. "It's habit with a man who shoots. Besides, seeing him was like a bit of Scotland—their auerhahn is kin to the black-cock and capercailzie. So I marked him to the skirt of Thusis, yonder—in line with that needle across the gulf and, through it, to that bunch of pinkish-stemmed pines—there where the brook falls into silver dust above that gorge. He'll lie there. Just before daybreak he'll mount to the top of one of those pines. We'll hear his yelping. That's our only chance at him."