Part 40 (1/2)

When the news of a Hun atrocity committed on Swiss territory was flashed to Berne, the Federal a.s.sembly 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 repet.i.tion of that eruption of barbarians which had overwhelmed the land in 400 A. D. till every pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.lish 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 ma.s.sive 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-b.u.t.ts 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s of distended feathers, glared at him out of blazing scarlet eyes; and all around was his vomit and casting in a ma.s.s of b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.h.i.+rt the mountaineer's frieze jacket!--with staghorn b.u.t.tons. And the rough wool cuff fell on the hands of a d.u.c.h.ess!--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.