In Secret

"Could you ever hit him in the dark of dawn, Kay?"

"With a pistol? And him atop a pine? No, not under ordinary conditions. But I'm hungry, dear Yellow-hair, and that is not all: you are hungry—" He looked at her so intently that the colour tinted her face and the faint little thrill again possessed her.

Her glance stole involuntarily toward the white butterflies. One had disappeared. The two others, drunk with their courtship, clung to a scented blossom.

Gravely Miss Erith lifted her young eyes to the eternal peaks—to Thusis, icy, immaculate, chastely veiled before the stealthy advent of the night.

Oddly, yet without fear, death seemed to her very near. And love, also—both in the air, both abroad and stirring, yet neither now of vital consequence. Only service meant anything now to this young man so near her—to herself. And after that—after accomplishment—love?—death?—either might come to them then. And find them ready, perhaps.

The awful, witch-like screaming of the lammergeier saluted the falling darkness where he squatted, a huge huddle of unclean plumage amid the debris of decay and death.

"I don't believe I could have faced that," murmured the girl. "You have more courage than I have, Kay."

"No! I was scared stiff. A bird like that could break a man's arm with a wing-blow…. That—that thing he'd been feeding on—it must have been a Boche of high military rank to carry these papers."

"You could not find out?"

"There were only the rags of his mufti there and these papers inside them. Nothing to identify him personally—not a tag, not a shred of anything. Unless the geier bolted it—"

She turned aside in disgust at the thought.

"When do you suppose he happened to fall to his death there, Kay?"

"In the darkness when the Huns scattered after the crucifixion. Perhaps the horror of it came suddenly upon him—God knows what happened when he stepped outward into depthless space and went crashing down to hell."

They had stayed their hunger on the rations. It was bitter cold in the leafy lap of Thusis, but they feared to light a fire that night.

McKay fed and covered the pigeons in their light wicker box which was carried strapped to his mountain pack.

Evelyn Erith fell asleep in her blanket under the dead leaves piled over her by McKay. After awhile he slept too; but before dawn he awoke, took a flash-light and his pistol and started down the slope for the wood's edge.

Her sweet, sleepy voice halted him: "Kay dear?"

"Yes, Yellow-hair."

"May I go?"

"Don't you want to sleep?"

"No."

She sat up under a tumbling shower of silvery dead leaves, shook out her hair, gathered it and twisted it around her brow like a turban.

Then, flashing her own torch, she sprang to her feet and ran lightly down to where the snow brook whirled in mossy pools below.

When she came back he took her cold smooth little hand fresh from icy ablutions: "We must beat it," he said; "that auerhahn won't stay long in his pine-tree after dawn. Extinguish your torch."

She obeyed and her warning fingers clasped his more closely as together they descended the path of light traced out before them by his electric torch.

Down, down, down they went under hard-wood and evergreen, across little fissures full of fern, skirting great slabs of rock, making detours where tangles checked progress.

Through tree-tops the sky glittered—one vast sheet of stars; and in the forest was a pale lustre born of this celestial splendour—a pallid dimness like that unreal day which reigns in the regions of the dead.

"We might meet the shade of Helen here," said the girl, "or of Eurydice. This is a realm of spirits. … We may be one with them very soon—you and I. Do you suppose we shall wander here among these trees as long as time lasts?"

"It's all right if we're together, Yellow-hair."

There was no accent from his fingers clasped in hers; none in hers either.

"I hope we'll be together, then," she said.

"Will you search for me, Yellow-hair?"

"Yes. Will you, Kay?"

"Always."

"And I—always—until I find you or you find me." … Presently she laughed gaily under her breath: "A solemn bargain, isn't it?"

"More solemn than marriage."

"Yes," said the girl faintly.

Something went crashing off into the woods as they reached the hogback which linked them with the group of pines whither the big game-bird had pitched into cover. Perhaps it was a roe deer; McKay flashed the direction in vain.

"If it were a Boche?" she whispered.

"No; it sounded like a four-legged beast. There are chamois and roe deer and big mountain hares along these heights."

They went on until the hog-back of sheer rock loomed straight ahead, and beyond, against a paling sky, the clump of high pines toward which they were bound.

McKay extinguished his torch and pocketed it.

"The sun will lead us back, Yellow-hair," he whispered. "Now hold very tightly to my hand, for it's a slippery and narrow way we tread together."

The rocks were glassy. But there were bushes and mosses; and presently wild grass and soil on the other side.

All around them, now, the tall pines loomed, faintly harmonious in the rising morning breeze which, in fair weather, always blows DOWN from the upper peaks into the valleys. Into the shadows they passed together a little way; then halted. The girl rested one shoulder against a great pine, leaning there and facing him where he also rested, listening.

There reigned in the woods that intense stillness which precedes dawn—an almost painful tension resembling apprehension. Always the first faint bird-note breaks it; then silence ends like a deep sigh exhaling and death seems very far away.

Now above them the stars had grown very dim; and presently some faded out.

And after a little while a small mountain bird twittered sleepily. Then unseen by them, the east glimmered like a sheet of tarnished silver. And out over the dark world of mountains, high above the solitude, rang the uncanny cry of an auerhahn.

Again the big, unseen bird saluted the coming day. McKay stole forward drawing his pistol and the girl followed.

The weird outcry of the auerhahn guided them, sounding from somewhere above among the black crests of the pines, nearer at hand, now, clearer, closer, more weird, until McKay halted peering upward, his pistol poised.