In Secret

"The Hun has discovered a landing-place in Les Errues," said McKay.

"Watch him."

"There's another Hun somewhere along the shoulder of Thusis," said McKay. "They're exchanging signals. See how the plane circles like a patient hawk. He's waiting for something. What's he waiting for, I wonder?"

For ten minutes the airplane circled leisurely over Thusis. Then whatever the aviator was waiting for evidently happened, for he shut off his engine; came down in graceful spirals; straightened out; glided through the canyon and reappeared no more to the watchers in the forest of Thusis.

"Now," remarked McKay coolly, "we know where we ought to go. Are you ready, Yellow-hair?"

They had been walking for ten minutes when Miss Erith spoke in an ordinary tone of voice: "Kay? Do you think we're likely to come out of this?"

"No," he said, not looking at her.

"But we'll get our information, you think?"

"Yes."

The girl fell a few paces behind him and looked up at the pigeons where they sat in their light lattice cage crowning his pack.

"Please do your bit, little birds," she murmured to herself.

And, with a smile at them and a nod of confidence, she stepped forward again and fell into the rhythm of his stride.

Very far away to the west they heard thunder stirring behind Mount Terrible.

It was late in the afternoon when he halted near the eastern edges of Thusis's Forest.

"Yellow-hair," he said very quietly, "I've led you into a trap, I'm afraid. Look back. We've been followed!"

She turned. Through the trees, against an inky sky veined with lightning, three men came out upon the further edge of the hog-back which they had traversed a few minutes before, and seated themselves there In the shelter of the crag. All three carried shotguns.

"Yellow-hair?"

"Yes, Kay."

"You understand what that means?"

"Yes."

"Slip off your pack."

She disengaged her supple shoulders from the load and he also slipped off his pack and leaned it against a tree.

"Now," he said, "you have two pistols and plenty of ammunition. I want you to hold that hog-back. Not a man must cross."

However, the three men betrayed no inclination to cross. They sat huddled in a row sheltered from the oncoming storm by a great ledge of rock. But they held their shotguns poised and ready for action.

The girl crept toward a big walnut tree and, lying flat on her stomach behind it, drew both pistols and looked around at McKay. She was smiling.

His heart was in his throat as he nodded approval. He turned and went rapidly eastward. Two minutes later he came running back, exchanged a signal of caution with Miss Erith, and looked intently at the three men under the ledge. It was now raining.

He drew from his breast a little book and on the thin glazed paper of one leaf he wrote, with water-proof ink, the place and date. And began his message:

"United States Army Int. Dept No. 76 and No. 77 are trapped on the northwest edge of the wood of Les Errues which lies under the elbow of Mount Thusis. From this plateau we had hoped to overlook that section of the Hun frontier in which is taking place that occult operation known as 'The Great Secret,' and which we suspect is a gigantic engineering project begun fifty years ago for the purpose of piercing Swiss territory with an enormous tunnel under Mount Terrible, giving the Hun armies a road into France BEHIND the French battle-line and BEHIND Verdun.

"Unfortunately we are now trapped and our retreat is cut off. It is unlikely that we shall be able to verify our suspicions concerning the Great Secret. But we shall not be taken alive.

"We have, however, already discovered certain elements intimately connected with the Great Secret.

"No. 1. Papers taken from a dead enemy show that the region called Les Errues has been ceded to the Hun in a secret pact as the price that Switzerland pays for immunity from the Boche invasion.

"2nd. The Swiss people are ignorant of this.

"3rd. The Boche guards all approaches to Les Errues. Except by way of the Boche frontier there appears to be only one entrance to Les Errues. We have just discovered it. The path is as follows: From Delle over the Swiss wire to the Crucifix on Mount Terrible; from there east-by-north along the chestnut woods to the shoulder of Mount Thusis. From thence, north over hog-backs 1, 2, and 3 to the Forest of Thusis where we are now trapped.

"Northeast of the forest lies a level, treeless table-land half a mile in diameter called The Garden of Thusis. A BOCHE AIRPLANE LANDED THERE ABOUT THREE HOURS AGO.

"To reach the Forbidden Forest the aviators, leaving their machine in the Garden of Thusis, walked southwest into the woods where we now are. These woods end in a vast gulf to the north which separates them from the Forbidden Forest of Les Errues.

"BUT A CABLE CROSSES!

"That is the way they went; a tiny car holding two is swung under this cable and the passengers pull themselves to and fro across the enormous chasm.

"At the west end of this cable is a hut; in the hut is the machinery—a drum which can be manipulated so that the cable can be loosened and permitted to sag.

"The reason for dropping the cable is analogous to the reason for using drawbridges over navigable streams; there is only one landing-place for airplanes in this entire region and that is the level, grassy plateau northeast of Thusis Woods. It is so entirely ringed with snow-peaks that there is only one way to approach it for a landing, and that is through the canyon edging Thusis Woods. Now the wire cable blocks this canyon. An approaching airplane therefore hangs aloft and signals to the cable-guards, who lower the cable until it sags sufficiently to free the aerial passage-way between the cliffs. Then the aviator planes down, sweeps through the canyon, and alights on the plateau called Thusis's Garden. But now he must return; the cable must be lifted and stretched taut; and he must embark across the gulf in the little car which runs on grooved wheels to Les Errues.

"This is all we are likely to learn. Our retreat is cut off. Two cable-guards are in front of us; in front of them the chasm; and across the chasm lies Les Errues whither the aviator has gone and where, I do not doubt, are plenty more of his kind.

"This, and two carbons, I shall endeavour to send by pigeon. In extremity we shall destroy all our papers and identification cards and get what Huns we can, RESERVING FOR OUR OWN USES one cartridge apiece.

"(Signed) Nos. 76 AND 77."

It was raining furiously, but the heavy foliage of chestnut and walnut had kept his paper dry. Now in the storm-gloom of the woods lit up by the infernal glare of lightning he detached the long scroll of thin paper covered by microscopical writing and, taking off the rubber bands which confined one of the homing pigeons, attached the paper cylinder securely.

Then he crawled over with his bird and, lying flat alongside of Miss Erith, told her what he had discovered and what he had done about it. The roar of the rain almost obliterated his voice and he had to place his lips close to her ear.

For a long while they lay there waiting for the rain to slacken before he launched the bird. The men across the hog-back never stirred. Nobody approached from the rear. At last, behind Mount Terrible, the tall edges of the rain veil came sweeping out in ragged majesty. Vapours were ascending in its wake; a distant peak grew visible, and suddenly brightened, struck at the summit by a shaft of sunshine.

"Now!" breathed McKay. The homing pigeon, released, walked nervously out over the wet leaves on the forest floor, and, at a slight motion from the girl, rose into flight. Then, as it appeared above the trees, there came the cracking report of a shotgun, and they saw the bird collapse in mid-air and sheer downward across the hog-back. But it did not land there; the marksman had not calculated on those erratic gales from the chasm; and the dead pigeon went whirling down into the viewless gulf amid flying vapours mounting from unseen depths.

Miss Erith and McKay lay very still. The Hunnish marksman across the hog-back remained erect for a few moments like a man at the traps awaiting another bird. After awhile he coolly seated himself again under the dripping ledge.

"The swine!" said McKay calmly. He added: "Don't let them cross." And he rose and walked swiftly back toward the northern edge of the forest.

From behind a tree he could see two Hun cable-guards, made alert by the shot, standing outside their hut where the cable-machinery was housed.

Evidently the echoes of that shot, racketing and rebounding from rock and ravine, had misled them, for they had their backs turned and were gazing eastward, rifles pointed.

Without time for thought or hesitation, McKay ran out toward them across the deep, wet moss. One of them heard him too late and McKay's impact hurled him into the gulf. Then McKay turned and sprang on the other, and for a minute it was a fight of tigers there on the cable platform until the battered visage of the Boche split with a scream and a crashing blow from McKay's pistol-butt drove him over the platform's splintered edge.

And now, panting, bloody, dishevelled, he strained his ears, listening for a shot from the hog-back. The woods were very silent in their new bath of sunshine. A little Alpine bird was singing; no other sound broke the silence save the mellow, dripping noise from a million rain-drenched leaves.

McKay cast a rapid, uneasy glance across the chasm. Then he went into the cable hut.

There were six rifles there in a rack, six wooden bunks, and clothing on pegs—not military uniforms but the garments of Swiss mountaineers.

Like the three men across the hog-back, and the two whom he had so swiftly slain, the Hun cable-patrol evidently fought shy of the Boche uniform here on the edge of the Forbidden Forest.

Two of the cable-guard lay smashed to a pulp thousands of feet below. Where was the remainder of the patrol? Were the men with the shotguns part of it?

McKay stood alone in the silent hut, still breathless from his struggle, striving to think what was now best to do.

And, as he stood there, through the front window of the hut he saw an aviator and another man come down from the crest of Thusis to the chasm's edge, jump into the car which swung under the cable, and begin to pull themselves across toward the hut where he was standing.

The hut screened his retreat to the wood's edge. From there he saw the aviator and his companion land on the platform; heard them shouting for the dead who never would answer from their Alpine deeps; saw the airman at last go away toward the plateau where he had left his machine; heard the clanking of machinery in the hut; saw the steel cable begin to sag into the canyon; AND REALISED THAT THE AVIATOR WAS GOING BACK OVER FRANCE TO THE BOCHE TRENCHES FROM WHENCE HE HAD ARRIVED.

In a flash it came to McKay what he should try to do—what he MUST do for his country, for the life of the young girl, his comrade, for his own life: The watchers at the hog-back must never signal to that airman news of his presence in the Forbidden Forest!

The clanking of the cog-wheels made his steps inaudible to the man who was manipulating the machinery in the hut as he entered and shot him dead. It was rather sickening, for the fellow pitched forward into the machinery and one arm became entangled there.

But McKay, white of cheek and lip and fighting off a deathly nausea, checked the machinery and kicked the carrion clear. Then he set the drum and threw on the lever which reversed the cog-wheels. Slowly the sagging cable began to tighten up once more.

He had been standing there for half an hour or more in an agony of suspense, listening for any shot from the forest behind him, straining eyes and ears for any sign of the airplane.

And suddenly he heard it coming—a resonant rumour through the canyon, nearer, louder, swelling to a roar as the monoplane dashed into view and struck the cable with a terrific crash.

For a second, like a giant wasp suddenly entangled in a spider's strand, it whirled around the cable with a deafening roar of propellers; then a sheet of fire enveloped it; both wings broke off and fell; other fragments dropped blazing; and then the thing itself let go and shot headlong into awful depths!

Above it the taut cable vibrated and sang weirdly in the silence of the chasm.

The girl was still lying flat under the walnut-tree when McKay came back.

Without speaking he knelt, levelled his pistol and fired across at the man beyond the hog-back.

Instantly her pistol flashed, too; one of the men fell and tried to get up in a blind sort of way, and his comrades caught him by the arms and dragged him back behind the ledge.

"All right!" shouted one of the men from his cover, "we've plently of time to deal with you Yankee swine! Stay there and rot!"

"That was Skelton's voice," whispered Miss Erith with an involuntary shudder.

"They'll never attempt that hog-back under our pistols now," said McKay coolly. "Come, Yellow-hair; we're going forward."

"How?" she asked, bewildered.

"By cable, little comrade," he said, with a shaky gaiety that betrayed the tension of his nerves. "So pack up and route-step once more!"

He turned and looked at her and his face twitched:

"You wonderful girl," he said, "you beautiful, wonderful girl! We'll live to fly our pigeons yet, Yellow-hair, under the very snout of the whole Hun empire!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE LATE SIR W. BLINT

That two spies, a man and a woman, had penetrated the forest of Les Errues was known in Berlin on the 13th. Within an hour the entire machinery of the German Empire had been set in motion to entrap and annihilate these two people.

The formula distributed to all operators in the Intelligence Department throughout Hundom, and wherever Boche spies had filtered into civilised lands, was this:

"Two enemy secret agents have succeeded in penetrating the forest of Les Errues. One is a man, the other a woman.

"Both are Americans. The man is that civilian prisoner, Kay McKay, who escaped from Holzminden, and of whom an exact description is available.

"The woman is Evelyn Erith. Exact information concerning her is also available.

"The situation is one of extremest delicacy and peril. Exposure of the secret understanding with a certain neutral Power which permits us certain temporary rights within an integral portion of its territory would be disastrous, and would undoubtedly result in an immediate invasion of this neutral (sic) country by the enemy as well as by our own forces.

"This must not happen. Yet it is vitally imperative that these two enemy agents should be discovered, seized, and destroyed.

"Their presence in the forest of Les Errues is the most serious menace to the Fatherland that has yet confronted it.

"Upon the apprehension and destruction of these two spies depends the safety of Germany and her allies.

"The war can not be won, a victorious German peace can not be imposed upon our enemies, unless these two enemy agents are found and their bodies absolutely destroyed upon the spot along with every particle of personal property discovered upon their persons.

"More than that: the war will be lost, and with it the Fatherland, unless these two spies are seized and destroyed.

"The Great Secret of Germany is in danger.

"To possess themselves of it—for already they suspect its nature—and to expose it not only to the United States Government but to the entire world, is the mission of these two enemy agents.

"If they succeed it would mean the end of the German Empire.

"If our understanding with a certain neutral Power be made public, that also would spell disaster for Germany.

"The situation hangs by a hair, the fate of the world is suspended above the forest of Les Errues."

On the 14th the process of infiltration began. But the Hun invasion of Les Errues was not to be conducted in force, there must be no commotion there, no stirring, no sound, only a silent, stealthy, death-hunt in that shadowy forest—a methodical, patient, thorough preparation to do murder; a swift, noiseless execution.

Also, on the 14th, the northern sky beyond the Swiss wire swarmed with Hun airplanes patrolling the border.

Not that the Great Secret could be discovered from the air; that danger had been foreseen fifty years ago, and half a century's camouflage screened the results of steady, calculating relentless diligence.

But French or British planes might learn of the presence of these enemy agents in the dark forest of Les Errues, and might hang like hawks above it exchanging signals with them.

Therefore the northern sky swarmed with Boche aircraft—cautiously patrolling beyond the Swiss border, and only prepared to risk its violation if Allied planes first set them an example.

But for a week nothing moved in the heavens above Les Errues except an eagle. And that appeared every day, sheering the blue void above the forest, hovering majestically in circles hour after hour and then, at last, toward sundown, setting its sublime course westward, straight into the blinding disk of the declining sun.

The Hun airmen patrolling the border noticed the eagle. After a while, as no Allied plane appeared, time lagged with the Boche, and he came to look for this lone eagle which arrived always at the same hour in the sky above Les Errues, soared there hour after hour, then departed, flapping slowly westward until lost in the flames of sunset.

"As though," remarked one Boche pilot, "the bird were a phoenix which at the close of every day renews its life from its own ashes in the flames."

Another airman said: "It is not a Lammergeier, is it?"

"It is a Stein-Adler," said a third.

But after a silence a fourth airman spoke, seated before the hangar and studying a wild flower, the petals of which he had been examining with the peculiar interest of a nature-student:

"For ten days I have had nothing more important to watch than that eagle which appears regularly every day above the forest of Les Errues. And I have concluded that the bird is neither a Lammergeier nor a Stein-Adler."

"Surely," said one young Hun, "it is a German eagle."

"It must be," laughed another, "because it is so methodical and exact. Those are German traits."

The nature-student contemplated the wild blossom which he was now idly twirling between his fingers by its stem.

"It perplexes me," he mused aloud.

The others looked at him; one said: "What perplexes you, Von Dresslin?"

"That bird."

"The eagle?"

"The eagle which comes every day to circle above Les Errues. I, an amateur of ornithology am, perhaps, with all modesty, permitted to call myself?"

"Certainly," said several airmen at once.

Another added: "We all know you to be a naturalist."

"Pardon—a student only, gentlemen. Which is why, perhaps, I am both interested and perplexed by this eagle we see every day."

"It is a rare species?"

"It is not a familiar one to the Alps."

"This bird, then, is not a German eagle in your opinion, Von Dresslin?"

"What is it? Asiatic? African? Chinese?" asked another.

Von Dresslin's eyebrows became knitted.

"That eagle which we all see every day in the sky above Les Errues," he said slowly, "has a snow-white crest and tail."

Several airmen nodded; one said: "I have noticed that, too, watching the bird through my binoculars."

"I know," continued Von Dresslin slowly, "of only one species of eagle which resembles the bird we all see every day… It inhabits North America," he added thoughtfully.

There was a silence, then a very young airman inquired whether Von Dresslin knew of any authentic reports of an American eagle being seen in Europe.

"Authentic? That is somewhat difficult to answer," replied Von Dresslin, with the true caution of a real naturalist. "But I venture to tell you that, once before—nearly a year ago now—I saw an eagle in this same region which had a white crest and tail and was otherwise a shining bronze in colour."

"Where did you see such a bird?"

"High in the air over Mount Terrible." A deep and significant silence fell over the little company. If Count von Dresslin had seen such an eagle over the Swiss peak called Mount Terrible, and had been near enough to notice the bird's colour, every man there knew what had been the occasion.

For only once had that particular region of Switzerland been violated by their aircraft during the war. It had happened a year ago when Von Dresslin, patrolling the north Swiss border, had discovered a British flyer planing low over Swiss territory in the air-region between Mount Terrible and the forest of Les Errues.

Instantly the Hun, too, crossed the line: and the air-battle was joined above the forest.

Higher, higher, ever higher mounted the two fighting planes until the earth had fallen away two miles below them.

Then, out of the icy void of the upper air-space, now roaring with their engines' clamour, the British plane shot earthward, down, down, rushing to destruction like a shooting-star, and crashed in the forest of Les Errues.

And where it had been, there in mid-air, hung an eagle with a crest as white as the snow on the shining peaks below.

"He seemed suddenly to be there instead of the British plane," said Von Dresslin. "I saw him distinctly—might have shot him with my pistol as he sheered by me, his yellow eyes aflame, balanced on broad wings. So near he swept that his bright fierce eyes flashed level with mine, and for an instant I thought he meant to attack me.

"But he swept past in a single magnificent curve, screaming, then banked swiftly and plunged straight downward in the very path of the British plane."

Nobody spoke. Von Dresslin twirled his flower and looked at it in an absent-minded way.

"From that glimpse, a year ago, I believe I had seen a species of eagle the proper habitat of which is North America," he said.

An airman remarked grimly: "The Yankees are migrating to Europe. Perhaps their eagles are coming too."

"To pick our bones," added another.

And another man said laughingly to Von Dresslin:

"Fritz, did you see in that downfall of the British enemy, and the dramatic appearance of a Yankee eagle in his place, anything significant?"

"By gad," cried another airman, "we had John Bull by his fat throat, and were choking him to death. And now—the Americans!"

"If I dared cross the border and shoot that Yankee eagle to-morrow," began another airman; but they all knew it wouldn't do.

One said: "Do you suppose, Von Dresslin, that the bird we see is the one you saw a year ago?"

"It is possible."

"An American white-headed eagle?"

"I feel quite sure of it."

"Their national bird," said the same airman who had expressed a desire to shoot it.

"How could an American eagle get here?" inquired another man.

"By way of Asia, probably."

"By gad! A long flight!"

Dresslin nodded: "An omen, perhaps, that we may also have to face the Yankee on our Eastern front."

"The swine!" growled several.

Von Dresslin assented absently to the epithet. But his thoughts were busy elsewhere, his mind preoccupied by a theory which, Hunlike, he, for the last ten days, had been slowly, doggedly, methodically developing.

It was this: Assuming that the bird really was an American eagle, the problem presented itself very clearly—from where had it come? This answered itself; it came from America, its habitat.

Which answer, of course, suggested a second problem; HOW did it arrive?

Several theories presented themselves:

1st. The eagle might have reached Asia from Alaska and so made its way westward as far as the Alps of Switzerland.

2nd. It may have escaped from some public European zoological collection.

3rd. It may have been owned privately and, on account of the scarcity of food in Europe, liberated by its owner.

4th. It MIGHT have been owned by the Englishman whose plane Von Dresslin had destroyed.

And now Von Dresslin was patiently, diligently developing this theory:

If it had been owned by the unknown Englishman whose plane had crashed a year ago in Les Errues forest, then the bird was undoubtedly his mascot, carried with him in his flights, doubtless a tame eagle.