Chambers Robert William
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.
As yet the crests of the pines were merely soft blots above. Yet as they stood straining their eyes upward, striving to discover the location of the great bird by its clamour, vaguely the branches began to take shape against the greying sky.
Clearer, more distinct they grew until feathery masses of pine-needles stood clustered against the sky like the wondrous rendering in a Japanese print. And all the while, at intervals, the auerhahn's ghostly shrieking made a sinister tumult in the woods.
Suddenly they saw him. Miss Erith touched McKay and pointed cautiously. There, on a partly naked tree-top, was a huge, crouching mass—an enormous bird, pumping its head at every uttered cry and spreading a big fan-like tail and beating the air with stiff-curved drooping wings.
McKay whispered: "I'll try to shoot straight because you're hungry, Yellow-hair"; and all the while his pistol-arm slanted higher and higner. For a second, it remained motionless; then a red streak split the darkness and the pistol-shot crashed in her ears.
There came another sound, too—a thunderous flapping and thrashing in the tree-top, the furious battering, falling tumult of broken branches and blindly beating wings, drumming convulsively in descent. Then came a thud; a feathery tattoo on the ground; silence in the woods.
"And so you shall not go hungry, Yellow-hair," said McKay with his nice smile.
They had done a good deal by the middle of the afternoon; they had broiled the big bird, dined luxuriously, had stored the remainder in their packs which they were preparing to carry with them into the forbidden forest of Les Errues.
There was only one way and that lay over the white shoulder of Thusis—a cul-de-sac, according to all guide-books, and terminating in a rest-hut near a cave glistening with icy stalagmites called Thusis's Hair.
Beyond this there was nothing—no path, no progress possible—only a depthless gulf unabridged and the world of mountains beyond.
There was no way; yet, the time before, McKay had passed over the white shoulder of Thusis and had penetrated the forbidden land—had slid into it sideways, somewhere from Thusis's shoulder, on a fragment of tiny avalanche. So there was a way!
"I don't know how it happened, Yellow-hair," he was explaining as he adjusted and buckled her pack for her, "and whether I slid north or east I never exactly knew. But if there's a path into Les Errues except through the Hun wire, it must lie somewhere below Thusis. Because, unless such a path exists, except for that guarded strip lying between the Boche wire and the Swiss, only a winged thing could reach Les Errues across these mountains."
The girl said coolly: "Could you perhaps lower me into it?"
A slight flush stained his cheek-bones: "That would be my role, not yours. But there isn't rope enough in the Alps to reach Les Errues."
He was strapping the pigeon-cage to his pack as he spoke. Now he hoisted and adjusted it, and stood looking across at the mountains for a moment. Miss Erith's gaze followed him.
Thusis wore a delicate camouflage of mist. And there were other bad signs to corroborate her virgin warning: distant mountains had turned dark blue and seemed pasted in silhouettes against the silvery blue sky. Also the winds had become prophetic, blowing out of the valleys and UP the slopes.
All that morning McKay's thermometer had been rising and his barometer had fallen steadily; haze had thickened on the mountains; and, it being the season for the Fohn to blow, McKay had expected that characteristic warm gale from the south to bring the violent rain which always is to be expected at that season.
But the Fohn did not materialise; in the walnut and chestnut forest around them not a leaf stirred; and gradually the mountains cleared, became inartistically distinct, and turned a beautiful but disturbing dark-blue colour. And Thusis wore her vestal veil in the full sun of noon.
"You know, Yellow-hair," he said, "all these signs are as plain as printed notices. There's bad weather coming. The wind was south; now it's west. I'll bet the mountain cattle are leaving the upper pastures."
He adjusted his binoculars; south of Mount Terrible on another height there were alms; and he could see the cattle descending.
He saw something else, too, in the sky and level with his levelled lenses—something like a bird steering toward him through the whitish blue sky.
Still keeping it in his field of vision he spoke quietly: "There's an airplane headed this way. Step under cover, please."
The girl moved up under the trees beside him and unslung her glasses. Presently she also picked up the oncomer.
"Boche, Kay?"
"I don't know. A monoplane. A Boche chaser, I think. Yes…. Do you see the cross? What insolence! What characteristic contempt for a weaker people! Look at his signal! Do you see? Look at those smoke-balls and ribbons! See him soaring there like a condor looking for a way among these precipices."
The Hun hung low above them in mid-air, slowly wheeling over the gulf. Perhaps it was his shadow or the roar of his engines that routed out the lammergeier, for the unclean bird took the air on enormous pinions, beating his way upward till he towered yelping above the Boche, and their combined clamour came distinctly to the two watchers below.
Suddenly the Boche fired at the other winged thing; the enraged and bewildered bird sheered away in flight and the Hun followed.
"That's why he shot," said McKay. "He's got a pilot, now."
Eagle and plane swept by almost level with the forest where they stood staining with their shadows the white shoulder of Thusis.
Down into the gorge the great geier twisted; after him sped the airplane, banking steeply in full chase. Both disappeared where the flawless elbow of Thusis turns. Then, all alone, up out of the gulf soared the plane.
"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!"
