Part 4 (1/2)

He struck the lighted candle with his left hand and laughed again in the thick darkness.

”Shoot? I'll show you how to shoot, you old slacker----”

Gary fired.

After a silence Flint giggled in the choking darkness as the door opened cautiously again, and shot at the terrified orderly.

”I'm a c.o.c.kney, am I? And you don't think much of the Devon cuckoos, do you? Now I'll show you that I understand all kinds of cuckoos----”

Both flashes split the obscurity at the same moment. Flint fell back against the wall and slid down to the floor. The outer door began to open again cautiously.

But the orderly, half dressed, remained knee-deep in the snow by the doorway.

After a long interval Gary struck a match, then went over and lit the candle. And, as he turned, Flint fired from where he lay on the floor and Gary swung heavily on one heel, took two uncertain steps. Then his pistol fell clattering; he sank to his knees and collapsed face downward on the stones.

Flint, still lying where he had fallen, partly upright, against the wall, began to laugh, and died a few moments later, the wind from the slowly opening door stirring his fair hair and extinguis.h.i.+ng the candle.

And at last, through the opened door crept Carfax's orderly; peered into the darkness within, s.h.i.+vering in his unb.u.t.toned tunic, his boots wet with snow.

Dawn already whitened the east; and up out of the ghastly fog edging the German Empire, silhouetted, monstrous, against the daybreak, soared a _Lammergeyer_, beating the livid void with enormous, unclean wings.

The orderly heard its scream, shrank, cowering, against the door frame as the huge bird's ferocious red and yellow eyes blazed level with his.

Suddenly, above the clamor of the _Lammergeyer_, the shrill bell of the telephone began to ring.

The terrible racket of the _Lammergeyer_ filled the sky; the orderly stumbled into the room, slipped in a puddle of something wet, sent an empty bottle rolling and clinking away into the darkness; stumbled twice over prostrate bodies; reached the telephone, half fainting; whispered for help.

After a long, long while, the horror still thickly clogging vein and brain, he scratched a match, hesitated, then holding it high, reeled toward the door with face averted.

Outside the sun was already above the horizon, flas.h.i.+ng over Haut Alsace at his feet.

The _Lammergeyer_ was a speck in the sky, poised over France.

Up out of the infinite and sunlit chasm came a mocking, joyous hail--up through the sheer, misty gulf out of vernal depths: _Cuck_-oo! _Cuck_-oo!

_Cuck_-oo!

CHAPTER IV

RECONNAISSANCE

And that was the way Carfax ended--a tiny tragedy of incompetence compared to the mountainous official fiasco at Gallipoli. Here, a few perished among the filthy salamanders in the snow; there, thousands died in the burning Turkish gorse----

But that's history; and its makers are already officially d.a.m.ned.

But now concerning two others of the fed-up dozen on board the mule transport--Harry Stent and Jim Brown. Destiny linked arms with them; Fate jerked a mysterious thumb over her shoulder toward Italy. Chance detailed them for special duty as soon as they landed.

It was a magnificent sight, the disembarking of the British overseas military force sent secretly into Italy.