And somehow it is given to the stricken to recognise the ghostly spot when they draw near it and their appointed hour approaches.
There was a fallen tree — not long fallen — which in its earthward crash had hit another smaller tree, partly uprooting the latter so that it leaned at a perilous angle over a dry gully below.
Here dead leaves had drifted deep. And here these two came, and crept in among the withered branches and lay down among the fallen leaves. For a long while they lay motionless. Then she moved, turned over, and slipped into his arms.
Whether she slept or whether her lethargy was unconsciousness due to privation he could not tell. Her parted lips were blackened, her mouth and tongue swollen.
He held her for awhile, conscious that a creeping stupor threatened his senses — making no effort to save his mind from the ominous shadows that crept toward him like live things moving slowly, always a little nearer. Then pain passed through him like a piercing thread of fire, and he struggled upright, and saw her head slide down across his knees. And he realised that there were things for him to do yet — arrangements to make before the crawling shadows covered his body and stained his mind with the darkness of eternal night.
And first, while she still lay across his knees, he filled his pistol. Because she must die quickly if the Hun came. For when the Hun comes death is woman’s only sanctuary.
So he prepared a swift salvation for her. And, if the Hun came or did not come, still this last refuge must be secured for her before the creeping shadows caught him and the light in his mind died out.
With his loaded pistol lifted he sat a moment, staring into the woods out of bloodshot eyes; then he summoned all his strength and rose, letting his unconscious comrade slip from his knees to the bed of dead leaves.
Now with his knife he tried the rocky forest floor again, feeling blindly for water. He tried slashing saplings for a drop of sap.
The great tree that had fallen had broken off a foot above ground. The other tree slanted above a dry gully at such an angle that it seemed as though a touch would push it over, yet its foliage was still green and unwilted although the mesh of roots and earth were all exposed.
He noted this in a dull way, thinking always of water. And presently, scarcely knowing what he was doing, he placed both arms against the leaning trunk and began to push. And felt the leaning tree sway slowly earthward.
Then into the pain and confusion of his clouding mind something flashed with a dazzling streak of light — the flare-up of dying memory; and he hurled himself against the leaning tree. And it slowly sank, lying level and uprooted.
And in the black bed of the roots lay darkling a little pool of water.
The girl’s eyes unclosed on his. Her face and lips were dripping under the sopping, icy sponge of green moss with which he was bathing her and washing out her mouth and tongue.
Into her throat he squeezed the water, drop by drop only.
It was late in the afternoon before he dared let her drink.
During the night she slept an hour or two, awoke to ask for water, then slept again, only to awake to the craving that he always satisfied.
Before sunrise he took his pack, took both her shoes from her feet, tore some rags from the lining of her skirt and from his own coat, and leaving her asleep, went out into the grey dusk of morning.
When he again came to the poisoned spring he unslung his pack and, holding it by both straps, dragged it through marsh grass and fern, out through the fringe of saplings, out through low scrub and brake and over moss and lichens to the edge of the precipice beyond.
And here on a scrubby bush he left fragments of their garments entangled; and with his hobnailed heels he broke crumbling edges of rock and smashed the moss and stunted growth and tore a path among the Alpine roses which clothed the chasm’s treacherous edge, so that it might seem as though a heavy object had plunged down into the gulf below.
Such bowlders as he could stir from their beds and roll over he dislodged and pushed out, listening to them as they crashed downward, tearing the cliff’s grassy face until, striking some lower shelf, they bounded out into space.
Now in this bruised path he stamped the imprints of her two rough shoes in moss and soil, and drove his own iron-shod feet wherever lichen or earth would retain the imprint.
All the footprints pointed one way and ended at the chasm’s edge. And there, also, he left the wicker cage; and one of his pistols, too — the last and most desperate effort to deceive — for, near it, he flung the cartridge belt with its ammunition intact — on the chance that the Hun would believe the visible signs, because only a dying man would abandon such things.
For they must believe the evidence he had prepared for them — this crazed trail of two poisoned human creatures — driven by agony and madness to their own destruction.
And now, slinging on his pack, he made his way, walking backward, to the poisoned spring.
It was scarcely light, yet through the first ghostly grey of daybreak a few birds came; and he killed four with bits of rock before the little things could drink the sparkling, crystalline death that lay there silvered by the dawn.
She was still asleep when he came once more to the bed of leaves between the fallen trees. And she had not awakened when he covered his dry fire and brought to her the broth made from the birds.
There was, in his pack, a little food left. When he awakened her she smiled and strove to rise, but he took her head on his knees and fed her, holding the pannikin to her lips. And after he too had eaten he went to look into the hollow where the tree had stood; and found it brimming with water.
So he filled his bottles; then, with hands and knife, working cautiously and noiselessly he began to enlarge the basin, drawing out stones, scooping out silt and fibre.
All the morning he worked at his basin, which, fed by some deep-seated and living spring, now overflowed and trickled down into the dry gully below.
By noon he had a pool as large and deep as a bathtub; and he came and sat down beside her under the fallen mass of branches where she lay watching the water bubble up and clear itself of the clouded silt.
“You are very wonderful, Kay,” she sighed, but her bruised lips smiled at him and her scarred hand crept toward him and lay in his. Seated so, he told her what he had done in the grey of morning while she slept.
And, even as he was speaking, a far voice cried through the woods — distant, sinister as the harsh scream of a hawk that has made its kill.
Then another voice shouted, hoarse with triumph; others answered, near and far; the forest was full of the heavy, ominous sounds. For the Huns were gathering in eastward from the wooded western hills, and their sustained clamour filled the air like the unclean racket of vultures sighting abomination and eager to feed.
McKay laid his loaded pistol beside him.
“Dear Yellow-hair,” he whispered.
She smiled up at him. “If they think we died there on the edge of the precipice, then you and I should live…. If they doubt it they will come back through these woods…. And it isn’t likely that we shall live very long.”
“I know,” she said. And laid her other hand in his — a gesture of utter trust so exquisite that, for a moment, tears blinded him, and all the forest wavered grotesquely before his desperately fixed gaze. And presently, within the field of his vision, something moved — a man going westward among the trees his rifle slung over his shoulder. And there were others, too, plodding stolidly back toward the western forests of Les Errues — forms half-seen between trees, none near, and only two who passed within hearing, the trample of their heavy feet loud among the fallen leaves, their guttural voices distinct. And, as they swung westward, rifles slung, pipes alight, and with the air of surly hunters homeward bound after a successful kill, the hunted, lying close under their roof of branches, heard them boasting of their work and of the death their quarry had died — of their agony at the spring which drove them to that death in the depths of the awful
gulf beyond.
“And that,” shouted one, stifling with laughter, “I should like to have seen. It is all I have to regret of this jagd-that I did not see the wilde die!”
The other Hun was less cheerful: “But what a pity to leave that roe-deer lying there. Such good meat poisoned! Schade, immer schade! — to leave good meat like that in the forest of Les Errues!”
CHAPTER XI
VIA MALA
The girl sat bolt upright on her bed of dead leaves, still confused by sleep, her ears ringing with the loud, hard voice which had awakened her to consciousness of pain and hunger once again.
Not ten feet from her, between where she lay under the branches of a fallen tree, and the edge of the precipice beyond, full in the morning sunlight stood two men in the dress of Swiss mountaineers.
One of them was reading aloud from a notebook in a slow, decisive, metallic voice; the other, swinging two dirty flags, signalled the message out across the world of mountains as it was read to him in that nasty, nasal Berlin dialect of a Prussian junker.
“In the Staubbach valley no traces of the bodies have been discovered,” continued the tall, square-shouldered reader in his deliberate voice; “It is absolutely necessary that the bodies of these two American secret agents, Kay McKay and Evelyn Erith, be discovered, and all their papers, personal property, and the clothing and accoutrements belonging to them be destroyed without the slightest trace remaining.
“It is ordered also that, when discovered, their bodies be burned and the ashes reduced to powder and sown broadcast through the forest.”
The voice stopped; the signaller whipped his dirty tattered flags in the sunlight for a few moments more, then ceased and stood stiffly at attention, his sun-dazzled gaze fixed on a far mountain slope where something glittered — perhaps a bit of mica, perhaps the mirror of a helio.
Presently, in the same disagreeable, distinct, nasal, and measured voice, the speaker resumed the message:
“Until last evening it has been taken for granted that the American Intelligence Officer, McKay, and his companion, Miss Erith, made insane through suffering after having drunk at a spring the water of which we had prepared for them according to plan, had either jumped or fallen from the eastward cliffs of Les Errues into the gulf through which flows the Staubbach.
“But, up to last night, my men, who descended by the Via Mala, have been unable to find the bodies of these two Americans, although there is, on the cliffs above, every evidence that they plunged down there to the valley of the brook below, which is now being searched.
“If, therefore, my men fail to discover these bodies, the alarming presumption is forced upon us that these two Americans have once more tricked us; and that they may still be hiding in the Forbidden Forest of Les Errues.
“In that event proper and drastic measures will be taken, the air-squadron on the northern frontier co-operating.”
The voice ceased: the flags whistled and snapped in the wind for a little while longer, then the signaller came to stiffest attention.
“Tell them we descend by the Via Mala,” added the nasal voice.
The flags swung sharply into motion for a few moments more; then the Prussian officer pocketed his notebook; the signaller furled his flags; and, as they turned and strode westward along the border of the forest, the girl rose to her knees on her bed of leaves and peered after them.
What to do she scarcely knew. Her comrade, McKay, had been gone since dawn in quest of something to keep their souls and bodies en liaison — mountain hare, a squirrel perhaps, perhaps a songbird or two, or a pocketful of coral mushrooms — anything to keep them alive on that heart-breaking trail of duty at the end of which sat old man Death awaiting them, wearing a spiked helmet.
And what to do in this emergency, and in the absence of McKay, perplexed and frightened her; for her comrade’s strict injunction was to remain hidden until his return; and yet one of these men now moving westward there along the forest’s sunny edges had spoken of a way out and had called it the Via Mala. And that is what McKay had been looking for — a way out of the Forbidden Forest of Les Errues to the table-land below, where, through a cleft still more profound, rushed the black Staubbach under an endless mist of icy spray.
She must make up her mind quickly; the two men were drawing away from her — almost out of sight now.
On her ragged knees among the leaves she groped for his coat where he had flung it, for the weather had turned oppressive in the forest of Les Errues-and fumbling, she found his notebook and pencil, and tore out a leaf:
“Kay dear, two Prussians in Swiss mountain dress have been signalling across the knees of Thusis that our bodies have not been discovered in the ravine. They have started for the ravine by a way evidently known to them and which they speak of as the Via Mala. You told me to stay here, but I dare not let this last chance go to discover what we have been looking for — a path to the plateau below. I take my pistol and your trench-knife and I will try to leave signs for you to follow. They have started west along the cliffs and they are now nearly out of sight, so I must hurry. Yellow-hair.”
This bit of paper she left on her bed of leaves and pinned it to the ground with a twig. Then she rose painfully, drew in her belt and laced her tattered shoes, and, taking the trench-knife and pistol, limped out among the trees.
The girl was half naked in her rags; her shirt scarcely hung to her shoulders, and she fastened the stag-horn buttons on her jacket. Her breeches, which left both knees bare, were of leather and held out pretty well, but the heavy wool stockings gaped, and, had it not been for the hob-nails, the soles must have fallen from her hunter’s shoes.
At first she moved painfully and stiffly, but as she hurried, limping forward over the forest moss, limbs and body grew more supple and she felt less pain.
And now, not far beyond, and still full in the morning sunshine, marched the men she was following. The presumed officer strode on ahead, a high-shouldered frame of iron in his hunter’s garb; the signaller with furled flags tucked under his arm clumped stolidly at his heels with the peculiar peasant gait which comes from following uneven furrows in the wake of a plow.
For ten minutes, perhaps, the two men continued on, then halted before a great mass of debris, uprooted trees, long dead, the vast, mangled roots and tops of which sprawled in every direction between masses of rock, bowlders, and an indescribable confusion of brush and upheaved earth.
Nearer and nearer crept the girl, until, lying flat behind a beech-tree, she rested within earshot — so close, indeed, that she could smell the cigarette which the officer had lighted — smell, even, the rank stench of the sulphur match.
Meanwhile the signaller had laid aside his flags and while the officer looked on he picked up a heavy sapling from among the fallen trees. Using this as a lever he rolled aside a tree-trunk, then another, and finally a bowlder.
“That will do,” remarked the officer. “Take your flags and go ahead.”
Then Evelyn Erith, rising cautiously to her scarred knees, saw the signaller gather up his flags and step into what apparently was the bed of the bowlder on the edge of the windfall. But it was deeper than that, for he descended to his knees, to his waist, his shoulders; and then his head disappeared into some hole which she could not see.
Now the officer who had remained, calmly smoking his cigarette, flung the remains of it over the cliff, turned, surveyed the forest behind him with minute deliberation, then stepped into the excavation down which the signaller had disappeared.
Some instinct kept the girl motionless after the man’s head had vanished; minute after minute passed, and Evelyn Erith never stirred. And suddenly the officer’s head and shoulders popped up from the hole and he peered back at the forest like an alarmed marmot. And the girl saw his hands resting on the edge of the hole; and the hands grasped two pistols.
Presently, apparently reassured and convinced that nobody was attempting to follow him, he slowly sank out of sight once more.
The girl waited; and while waiting she cut a long white sliver from the beech-tree and carved an arrow pointing toward the heap of debris. Then, with the keen tip of her trench-knife she scratched on the silvery bark:
“An underground way in the windfall. I have followed them.
Yellow-hair.”
She crept stealthily out into the sunshine through the vast abatis of the fallen trees and came to the edge of the hole. Looking down fearfully she realised at once that this was the dry, rocky stairs of some subterranean watercourse through which, in springtime, great fields of melting snow poured in torrents down the face of the precipice below.
There were no loose stones to be seen; the rocky escalier had been swept clean unnumbered ages since; but the rocks were fearfully slippery, shining with a vitreous polish where the torrents of many thousand years had worn them smooth.
And this was what they called the Via Mala! — this unsuspected and secret underground way that led, God knew how, into the terrific depths below.
There was another Via Mala: she had seen it from Mount Terrible; but it was a mountain path trodden not infrequently. This Via Mala, however, wormed its way downward into shadows. Where it led and by what perilous ways she could only imagine. And were these men perhaps, lying in ambush for her somewhere below — on the chance that they might have been seen and followed?
What would they do to her — shoot her? Push her outward from some rocky shelf into the misty gulf below? Or would they spring on her and take her alive? At the thought she chilled, knowing what a woman might expect from the Hun.
She threw a last look upward where they say God dwells somewhere behind the veil of blinding blue; then she stepped downward into the shadows.
For a rod or two she could walk upright as long as she could retain her insecure footing on the glassy, uneven floor of rock; and a vague demi-light reigned there making objects distinct enough for her to see the stalactites and stalagmites like discoloured teeth in a chevaux-de-frise.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 914
