In Secret

"Yes. If you'll follow me."

He went to his pack, put it swiftly in order, hoisted it, resumed the tump-line, and looked around at Evelyn for his rifle.

But she had already slung it across her own shoulders and she pointed at his wounded hand and its blood-black bandage and motioned him forward.

The sun hung on the shoulder of a snow-capped alp when at last these three had had their brief understanding concerning one another's identity, credentials, and future policy.

Gray's lair, in a bushy hollow between two immense jutting cakes of granite, lay on the very brink of the chasm. And there they sat, cross-legged in the warmth of the declining sun in gravest conference concerning the future.

"Recklow insisted that I come," repeated Gray. "I was in the 208th Pioneers—in a sawmilll near La Roche Rouge—Vosges—when I got my orders."

"And Recklow thinks we're caught and killed?"

"So does everybody in the Intelligence. The Mulhausen paper had it that the Swiss caught you violating the frontier, which meant to Recklow that the Boche had done you in."

"I see," nodded McKay.

"So he picked me."

"And you say you guided in Maine?"

"Yes, when I was younger. After I was on my own I kept store at South Carry, Maine, and ran the guides there."

"I noticed all the ear-marks," nodded McKay.

Gray smiled: "I guess they're there all right if a man knows 'em when he sees 'em."

"Were you badly shot up?"

"Not so bad. They shoot a pea-rifle, single shot all over silver and swallowtail stock—"

"I know," smiled McKay.

"Well, you know them. It drills nasty with a soft bullet, cleaner with a chilled one. My left hand's a wreck but I sha'n't lose it."

"I had better dress it before night," said Evelyn.

"I dressed it at noon. I won't disturb it again to-day," said Gray, thanking her with his eloquent blue eyes.

McKay said: "So you found the place where I once slid off?"

"It's plain enough, windfall and general wreckage mark it."

"You say it's a dozen miles west of here?"

"About."

"That's odd," said McKay thoughtfully. "I had believed I recognised this ravine. But these deep gulfs all look more or less alike. And I saw it only once and then under hair-raising circumstances."

Gray smiled, but Evelyn did not. McKay said:

"So that's where they winged you, was it?"

"Yes. I was about to negotiate the slide—you remember the V-shaped slate cleft?"

"Yes."

"Well, I was just starting into that when the rifle cracked and I jumped for a tree with a broken wing and a bad scare."

"You saw the man?"

"I did later. He came over to look for dead game, and I ached to let him go; but it was too risky with Les Errues swarming alive with Boches, and me with the stomach-sickness of a shot-up man. Figure it out, McKay, for yourself."

"Of course, you did the wise thing and the right one."

"I think so. I travelled until I fainted." He turned and glanced around. "Strangely enough I saw black right here!—fell into this hole by accident, and have made it my home since then."

"It was a Godsend," said the girl.

"It was, Miss Erith," said Gray, resting his eloquent eyes on her.

"And you say," continued McKay, "that the Boche are sitting up day and night over that slide?"

"Day and night. The swine seem to know it's the only way out. I go every day, every night. Always the way is blocked; always I discover one or more of their riflemen there in ambush while the rest of the pack are ranging Les Errues."

"And yet," said McKay, "we've got to go that way, sooner or later."

There was a silence: then Gray nodded.

"Yes," he said, "but it is a question of waiting."

"There is a moon to-night," observed Evelyn Erith.

McKay lifted his head and looked at her gravely: Gray's blue eyes flashed his admiration of a young girl who quietly proposed to face an unknown precipice at night by moonlight under the rifles of ambushed men.

"After all," said McKay slowly, "is there ANY other way?"

In the silence which ensued Evelyn Erith, who had been lying between them on her stomach, her chin propped up on both hands, suddenly raised herself on one arm to a sitting posture.

Instantly Gray shrank back, white as a sheet, lifting his mutilated hand in its stiffened and bloody rags; and the girl gasped out her agonised apology:

"Oh—CAN you forgive me! It was unspeakable of me!"

"It—it's all right," said Gray, the colour coming back to his face; but the girl in her excitement of self-reproach and contrition begged to be allowed to dress the mutilated hand which her own careless movement had almost crushed.

"Oh, Kay-I set my hand on his wounded fingers and rested my full weight! Oughtn't he to let us dress it again at once?"

But Gray's pluck was adamant, and he forced a laugh, dismissing the matter with another glance at Evelyn out of clear blue eyes that said a little more than that no harm had been done—said, in one frank and deep-flashing look, more than the girl perhaps cared to understand.

The sun slipped behind the rocky flank of a great alp; a burst of rosy glory spread fan-wise to the zenith.

Against it, tall and straight and powerful, Gray rose and walking slowly to the cliff's edge, looked down into the valley mist now rolling like a vast sea of cloud below them.

And, as he stood there, Evelyn's hand grasped McKay's arm:

"If he touches his rifle, shoot! Quick, Kay!"

McKay's right hand fell into his side-pocket—where one of his automatics lay. He levelled it as he grasped it, hidden within the side-pocket of his coat.

"HIS HAND IS NOT WOUNDED," breathed the girl. "If he touches his rifle he is a Hun!"

McKay's head nodded almost imperceptibly. Gray's back was still turned, but one hand was extended, carelessly reaching for the rifle that stood leaning against the cake of granite.

"Don't touch it!" said McKay in a low but distinct voice: and the words galvanised the extended arm and it shot out, grasping the rifle, as the man himself dropped out of sight behind the rock.

A terrible stillness fell upon the place; there was not a sound, not a movement.

Suddenly the girl pointed at a shadow that moved between the rocks—and the crash of McKay's pistol deafened them.

Then, against the dazzling glory of the west a dark shape staggered up, clutching a wavering rifle, reeling there against the rosy glare an instant; and the girl turned her sick eyes aside as McKay's pistol spoke again.

Like a shadow cast by hell the black form swayed, quivered, sank away outward into the blinding light that shone across the world.

Presently a tinkling sound came up from the fog-shrouded depths—the falling rifle striking ledge after ledge until the receding sound grew fainter and more distant, and finally was heard no more.

But that was the only sound they heard; for the man himself lay still on the chasm's brink, propped from the depths by a tuft of alpine roses in full bloom, his blue eyes wide open, a blue hole just between them, and his bandaged hand freed from its camouflage, lying palm upward and quite uninjured on the grass!

CHAPTER X

THE GREATER LOVE

As the blinding lens of the sun glittered level and its first rays poured over tree and rock, a man in the faded field-uniform of a Swiss officer of mountain artillery came out on the misty ledge across the chasm.

"You over there!" he shouted in English. "Here is a Swiss officer to speak with you! Show yourselves!"

Again, after waiting a few moments, he shouted: "Show yourselves or answer. It is a matter of life or death for you both!"

There was no reply to the invitation, no sound from the forest, no movement visible. Thin threads of vapour began to ascend from the tremendous depths of the precipice, steaming upward out of mist-choked gorges where, under thick strata of fog, night still lay dark over unseen Alpine valleys below.

The Swiss officer advanced to the cliff's edge and looked down upon a blank sea of cloud. Presently he turned east and walked cautiously along the rim of the chasm for a hundred yards. Here the gulf narrowed so that the cleft between the jutting crags was scarcely a hundred feet in width. And here he halted once more and called across in a resonant, penetrating voice:

"Attention, you, over there in the Forest of Les Errues! You had better wake up and listen! Here is a Swiss officer come to speak with you. Show yourselves or answer!"

There came no sound from within the illuminated edges of the woods.

But outside, upon the chasm's sparkling edge, lay a dead man stark and transfigured and stiff as gold in the sun.

And already the first jewelled death-flies zig-zagged over him, lacing the early sunshine with ominous green lightning.

They who had killed this man might not be there behind the sunlit foliage of the forest's edge; but the Swiss officer, after waiting a few moments, called again, loudly. Then he called a third time more loudly still, because into his nostrils had stolen the faint taint of dry wood smoke. And he stood there in silhouette against the rising sun listening, certain, at last, of the hidden presence of those he sought.

Now there came no sound, no stirring behind the forest's sunny edge; but just inside it, in the lee of a huge rock, a young girl in ragged boy's clothing, uncoiled her slender length from her blanket and straightened out flat on her stomach. Her yellow hair made a spot like a patch of sunlight on the dead leaves. Her clear golden eyes were as brilliant as a lizard's.

From his blanket at her side a man, gaunt and ragged and deeply bitten by sun and wind, was pulling an automatic pistol from its holster. The girl set her lips to his ear:

"Don't trust him, for God's sake, Kay," she breathed.

He nodded, felt forward with cautious handgroping toward a damp patch of moss, and drew himself thither, making no sound among the dry leaves.

"Watch the woods behind us, Yellow-hair," he whispered.

The girl fumbled in her tattered pocket and produced a pistol. Then she sat up cross-legged on her blanket, rested one elbow across her knee, and, cocking the poised weapon, swept the southern woods with calm, bright eyes.

Now the man in Swiss uniform called once more across the chasm: "Attention, Americans I I know you are there; I smell your fire. Also, what you have done is plain enough for me to see—that thing lying over there on the edge of the rocks with corpse-flies already whirling over it! And you had better answer me, Kay McKay!"

Then the man in the forest who now was lying flat behind a birch-tree, answered calmly:

"You, in your Swiss uniform of artillery, over there, what do you want of me?"

"So you are there!" cried the Swiss, striving to pierce the foliage with eager eyes. "It is you, is it not, Kay McKay?"

"I've answered, have I not?"

"Are you indeed then that same Kay McKay of the Intelligence Service, United States Army?"

"You appear to think so. I am Kay McKay; that is answer enough for you."

"Your comrade is with you—Evelyn Erith?"

"None of your business," returned McKay, coolly.

"Very well; let it be so then. But that dead man there—why did you kill your American comrade?"

"He was a camouflaged Boche," said McKay contemptously. "And I am very sure that you're another—you there, in your foolish Swiss uniform. So say what you have to say and clear out!"

The officer came close to the edge of the chasm: "I can not expect you to believe me," he said, "and yet I really am what I appear to be, an officer of Swiss Mountain Artillery. If you think I am something else why do you not shoot me?"

McKay was silent. "Nobody would know," said the other. "You can kill me very easily. I should fall into the ravine—down through that lake of cloud below. Nobody would ever find me. Why don't you shoot?"

"I'll shoot when I see fit," retorted McKay in a sombre voice. Presently he added in tones that rang a little yet trembled too—perhaps from physical reasons—"What do you want of a hunted man like me?"

"I want you to leave Swiss territory!"

"Leave!" McKay's laugh was unpleasant. "You know damned well I can't leave with Les Errues woods crawling alive with Huns."

"Will you leave the canton of Les Ernies, McKay, if I show you a safe route out?"

And, as the other made no reply: "You have no right to be here on neutral territory," he added, "and my Government desires you to leave at once!"

"I have as much right here as the Huns have," said McKay in his pleasant voice.

"Exactly. And these Germans have no right here either!"

"That also is true," rejoined McKay gently, "so why has your Government permitted the Hun to occupy the Canton of Les Errues? Oh, don't deny it," he added wearily as the Swiss began to repudiate the accusation; "you've made Les Errues a No-Man's Land, and it's free hunting now! If you're sick of your bargain, send in your mountain troops and turn out the Huns."

"And if I also send an escort and a free conduct for you and your comrade?"

"No."

"You will not be harmed, not even interned. We set you across our wire at Delle. Do you accept?"

"No."

"With every guarantee—"

"You've made this forest a part of the world's battle-field…. No, I shall not leave Les Errues!"

"Listen to reason, you insane American! You can not escape those who are closing in on you—those who are filtering the forest for you—who are gradually driving you out into the eastern edges of Les Errues! And what then, when at last you are driven like wild game by a line of beaters to the brink of the eastern cliffs? There is no water there. You will die of thirst. There is no food. What is there left for you to do with your back to the final precipice?"

McKay laughed a hard, unpleasant laugh: "I certainly shall not tell you what I mean to do," he said. "If this is all you have to say to me you may go!"

There ensued a silence. The Swiss began to pace the opposite cliff, his hands behind him. Finally he halted abruptly and looked across the chasm.

"Why did you come into Les Errues?" he demanded.

"Ask your terrified authorities. Perhaps they'll tell you—if their teeth stop chattering long enough—that I came here to find out what the Boche are doing on neutral territory."

"Do you mean to say that you believe in that absurd rumour about some secret and gigantic undertaking by the Germans which is supposed to be visible from the plateau below us?"

And, as McKay made no reply: "That is a silly fabrication. If your Government, suspicious of the neutrality of mine, sent you here on any such errand, it was a ridiculous thing to do. Do you hear me, McKay?"

"I hear you."

"Well, then! And let me add also that it is a physical impossibility for any man to reach the plateau below us from the forest of Les Errues!"

"That," said McKay, coldly, "is a lie!"

"What! You offer a Swiss officer such an injury—"

"Yes; and I may add an insulting bullet to the injury in another minute. You've lied to me. I have already done what you say is an impossibility. I have reached the plateau below Les Errues by way of this forest. And I'm going there again, Swiss or no Swiss, Hun or no Hun! And if the Boche do drive me out of this forest into the east, where you say there is no water to be found among the brush and bowlders, and where, at last, you say I shall stand with my back to the last sheer precipice, then tell your observation post on the white shoulder of Thusis to turn their telescopes on me!"

"In God's name, for what purpose?"

"To take a lesson in how to die from the man your nation has betrayed!" drawled McKay.

Then, lying flat, he levelled his pistol, supporting it across the palm of his left hand.

"Yellow-hair?"' he said in a guarded voice, not turning.

"Yes, Kay."

"Slip the pack over your shoulders. Take the pigeon and the rifle. Be quick, dear."

"It is done," she said softly.

"Now get up and make no noise. Two men are lying in the scrub behind that fellow across the chasm. I am afraid they have grenades…. Are you ready, Yellow-hair?"

"Ready, dear."

"Go eastward, swiftly, two hundred yards parallel with the precipice. Make no sound, Yellow-hair."

The girl cast a pallid, heart-breaking look at him, but he lay there without turning his head, his steady pistol levelled across the chasm. Then, bending a trifle forward, she stole eastward through the forest dusk, the pigeon in its wicker cage in one hand, and on her back the pack.

And all the while, across the gulf out of which golden vapours curled more thickly as the sun's burning searchlight spread out across the world, the man in Swiss uniform stood on the chasm's edge, as though awaiting some further word or movement from McKay.

And, after awhile, the word came, clear, startling, snapped out across the void:

"Unsling that haversack! Don't touch the flap! Take it off, quick!"

The Swiss seemed astounded. "Quick!" repeated McKay harshly, "or I fire."

"What!" burst out the man, "you offer violence to a Swiss officer on duty within Swiss territory?"

"I tell you I'll kill you where you stand if you don't take off that haversack!"

Suddenly from the scrubby thicket behind the Swiss a man's left arm shot up at an angle of forty degrees, and the right arm described an arc against the sun. Something round and black parted from it, lost against the glare of sunrise.

Then in the woods behind McKay something fell heavily, the solid thud obliterated in the shattering roar which followed.

The man in Swiss uniform tore at the flap of his haversack, and he must have jerked loose the plug of a grenade in his desperate haste, for as McKay's bullet crashed through his face, the contents of his sack exploded with a deafening crash.

At the same instant two more bombs fell among the trees behind McKay, exploding instantly. Smoke and the thick golden steam from the ravine blotted from his sight the crag opposite. And now, bending double, McKay ran eastward while behind him the golden dusk of the woods roared and flamed with exploding grenades.

Evelyn Erith stood motionless and deathly white, awaiting him.

"Are you all right, Kay?"

"All right, Yellow-hair."

He went up to her, shifting his pistol to the other hand, and as he laid his right arm about her shoulders the blaze in his eyes almost dazzled her.

"We trust no living thing on earth, you and I, Yellow-hair…. I believed that man for awhile. But I tell you whatever is living within this forest is our enemy—and if any man comes in the shape of my dearest friend I shall kill him before he speaks!"

The man was shaking now; the girl caught his right hand and drew it close around her body—that once warm and slender body now become so chill and thin under the ragged clothing of a boy.

"Drop your face on my shoulder," she said.

His wasted cheek seemed feverish, burning against her breast.

"Steady, Kay," she whispered.

"Right!… What got me was the thought of you—there when the grenades fell…. They blew a black pit where your blanket lay!"

He lifted his head and she smiled into the fever-bright eyes set so deeply now in his ravaged visage. There were words on her lips, trembling to be uttered. But she dared not believe they would add to his strength if spoken. He loved her. She had long known that—had long understood that loving her had not hardened his capacity for the dogged duty which lay before him.

To win out was a task sufficiently desperate; to win out and bring her through alive was the double task that was slowly, visibly killing this man whose burning, sunken eyes gazed into hers. She dared not triple that task; the cry in her heart died unuttered, lest he ever waver in duty to his country when in some vital crisis that sacred duty clashed with the obligations that fettered him to a girl who had confessed she loved him.

No; the strength that he might derive from such a knowledge was not that deathless energy and clear thinking necessary to blind, stern, unswerving devotion to the motherland. Love of woman, and her love given, could only make the burden of decision triply heavy for this man who stood staring at space beside her here in the forest twilight where shreds of the night mist floated like ghosts and a lost sunspot glowed and waned and glowed on last year's leaves.

The girl pressed her waist with his arm, straightened her shoulders and stood erect; and with a quick gesture cleared her brow of its cloudy golden hair.

"Now," she said coolly, "we carry on, you and I, Kay, to the honour and glory of the land that trusts us in her hour of need… Are you are right again?"

"All right, Yellow-hair," he said pleasantly.

On the third day the drive had forced them from the hilly western woods, eastward and inexorably toward that level belt of shaggy forest, scrub growth, and arid, bowlder-strewn table-land where there was probably no water, nothing living to kill for food, and only the terrific ravines beyond where cliffs fell downward to the dim green world lying somewhere below under its blanket of Alpine mist.

On the fourth day, still crowded outward and toward the ragged edge of the mountain world, they found, for the first time, no water to fill their bottles. Realising their plight, McKay turned desperately westward, facing pursuit, ranging the now narrow forest in hopes of an opportunity to break through the closing line of beaters.

But it proved to be a deadline that he and his half-starved comrade faced; shadowy figures, half seen, sometimes merely heard and divined, flitted everywhere through the open woods beyond them. And at night a necklace of fires—hundreds of them—barred the west to them, curving outward like the blade of a flaming scimitar.

On the fifth day McKay, lying in his blanket beside the girl, told her that if they found no water that day they must let their carrier-pigeon go.

The girl sat up in her torn blanket and met his gaze very calmly. What he had just said to her meant the beginning of the end. She understood perfectly. But her voice was sweet and undisturbed as she answered him, and they quietly discussed the chances of discovering water in some sunken hole among the outer ledges and bowlders whither they were being slowly and hopelessly forced.

Noon found them still searching for some pocket of stale rain-water; but once only did they discover the slightest trace of moisture—a crust of slime in a rocky basin, and from it a blind lizard was slowly creeping—a heavy, lustreless, crippled thing that toiled aimlessly and painfully up the rock, only to slide back into the slime again, leaving a trail of iridescent moisture where its sagging belly dragged.

In a grove of saplings there were a few ferns; and here McKay dug with his trench knife; but the soil proved to be very shallow; everywhere rock lay close to the surface; there was no water there under the black mould.

To and fro they roamed, doggedly seeking for some sign of water. And the woods seemed damp, too; and there were long reaches of dewy ferns. But wherever McKay dug, his knife soon touched the solid rock below. And they wandered on.

In the afternoon, resting in the shade, he noticed her lips were bleeding—and turned away, sharply, unable to endure her torture. She seemed to understand his abrupt movement, for she leaned slightly against him where he sat amid the ferns with his back to a tree—as a dog leans when his master is troubled.

"I think," she said with an effort, "we should release our pigeon now. It seems to be very weak."

He nodded.

The bird appeared languid; hunger and thirst were now telling fast on the little feathered messenger.

Evelyn shook out the last dusty traces of corn; McKay removed the bands. But the bird merely pecked at the food once or twice and then settled down with beak gaping and the film stealing over its eyes.

McKay wrote on tissue the date and time of day; and a word more to say that they had, now, scarcely any chance. He added, however, that others ought to try because there was no longer any doubt in his mind that the Boche were still occupied with some gigantic work along the Swiss border in the neighbourhood of Mount Terrible; and that the Swiss Government, if not abetting, at least was cognizant of the Hun activities.

This message he rolled into a quill, fastened it, took the bird, and tossed it westward into the air.