THE FORBIDDEN FOREST
When the news of a Hun atrocity committed on Swiss territory was
flashed to Berne, the Federal Assembly 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 repetition of that eruption of
barbarians which had overwhelmed the land in 400 A. D. till every
pass 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 hellish 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 massive 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-butts 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 space 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 mass of distended feathers, glared at him out of
blazing scarlet eyes; and all around was his vomit and casting in a
mass of bloody 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 space 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 bloody 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 shirt the mountaineer's frieze
jacket!--with staghorn buttons. And the rough wool cuff fell on the
hands of a duchess!--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.
"I'll do them," he remarked, his eyes involuntarily seeking her
hands.
A pink flush grew on her weather-tanned face--or perhaps it was the
reddening sunlight stealing through some velvet piny space in the
forest barrier. If it was a slight blush in recognition of his
admiration she wondered at her capacity for blushing. However, Marie
Antoinette coloured from temple to throat on the scaffold. But the
girl knew that the poor Queen's fate was an enviable one compared to
what awaited her if she fell into the hands of the Hun.
McKay seated himself near her. The sunny silence of the mountains
was intense. Over a mass of alpine wild flowers hanging heavy and
fragrant between rocky clefts two very large and intensely white
butterflies fought a fairy battle for the favours of a third--a
dainty, bewildering creature, clinging to an unopened bud, its snowy
wings a-quiver.
The girl's golden eyes noted the pretty courtship, and her side
glance rested on the little bride to be with an odd, indefinite
curiosity, partly interrogative, partly disdainful.
It seemed odd to the girl that in this Alpine solitude life should
be encountered at all. And as for life's emotions, the frail,
frivolous, ephemeral fury of these white-winged ghosts of daylight,
embattled and all tremulous with passion, seemed exquisitely amazing
to her here between the chaste and icy immobility of white-veiled
peaks and the terrific twilight of the world's depths below.
McKay, studying the papers, glanced up at Miss Erith. A bar of rosy
sunset light slanted almost level between them.
"There seems to be," he said slowly, "only one explanation for what
you and I read here. The Boche has had his filthy fist on the throat
of Switzerland for fifty years."
"And what is 'Les Errues' to which these documents continually
refer?" asked the girl.
"Les Errues is the twenty-seventh canton of Switzerland. It is the
strip of forest and crag which includes all the northeastern region
below Mount Terrible. It is a canton, a secret canton unrepresented
in the Federal Assembly--a region without human population--a secret
slice of Swiss wilderness OWNED BY GERMANY!"
"Kay, do you believe that?"
"I am sure of it now. It is that wilderness into which I stumbled.
It overlooks the terrain in Alsace where for fifty years the Hun has
been busy day and night with his sinister, occult operations. Its
entrance, if there be any save by the way of avalanches--the way I
entered--must be guarded by the Huns; its only exit into Hunland.
That is Les Errues. That is the region which masks the Great Secret
of the Hun."
He dropped the papers and, clasping his knees in his arms, sat
staring out into the infernal blaze of sunset.
"The world," he said slowly, "pays little attention to that
agglomeration of cantons called Switzerland. The few among us who
know anything about its government might recollect that there are
twenty-six cantons--the list begins, Aargau, Appenzell,
Ausser-Rhoden, Inner-Rhoden--you may remember--and ends with Valais,
Vaud, Zug, and Zurich. And Les Errues is the twenty-seventh canton!"
"Yes," said the girl in a low voice, "the evidence lies at your
feet."
"Surely, surely," he muttered, his fixed gaze lost on the crimson
celestial conflagration. She said, thinking aloud, and her clear
eyes on him:
"Then, of the Great Secret, we have learned this much anyway--that
there exists in Switzerland a secret canton called Les Errues; that
it is practically Hun territory; that it masks what they call their
Great Secret; that their ownership or domination of Les Errues is
probably a price paid secretly by the Swiss government for its
national freedom and that this arrangement is absolutely unknown to
anybody in the world outside of the Imperial Hun government and the
few Swiss who have inherited, politically, a terrible knowledge of
this bargain dating back, probably, from 1870."
"That is the situation we are confronting," admitted McKay calmly.
She said with perfect simplicity: "Of course we must go into Les
Errues."
"Of course, comrade. How?"
He had no plan--could have none. She knew it. Her question was
merely meant to convey to him a subtle confirmation of her loyalty
and courage. She scarcely expected to escape a dreadful fate on this
quest--did not quite see how either of them could really hope to
come out alive. But that they could discover the Great Secret of the
Hun, and convey to the world by means of their pigeons some details
of the discovery, she felt reasonably certain. She had much faith in
the arrangements they had made to do this.
"One thing worries me a lot," remarked McKay pleasantly.
"Food supply?"
He nodded.
She said: "Now that the Boche have left Mount Terrible--except that
wretched creature whose bones lie on the shelf below--we might
venture to kill whatever game we can find."
"I'm going to," he said. "The Swiss troops have cleared out. I've
got to risk it. Of course, down there in Les Errues, some Hun
guarding some secret chamois trail into the forbidden wilderness may
hear our shots."
"We shall have to take that chance," she remarked.
He said in the low, quiet voice which always thrilled her a little:
"You poor child--you are hungry."
"So are you, Kay."
"Hungry? These rations act like cocktails: I could barbecue a
roebuck and finish him with you at one sitting!"
"Monsieur et Madame Gargantua," she mocked him with her enchanting
laughter. Then, wistful: "Kay, did you see that very fat and saucy
auerhahn which the Swiss soldiers scared out of the pines down
there?"
"I did," said McKay. "My mouth watered."
"He was quite as big as a wild turkey," sighed the girl.
"They're devils to get," said McKay, "and with only a pistol--well,
anyway we'll try to-night. Did you mark that bird?"
"Mark him?"
"Yes; mark him down?"
She shook her pretty head.
"Well, I did," grinned McKay. "It's habit with a man who shoots.
Besides, seeing him was like a bit of Scotland--their auerhahn is
kin to the black-cock and capercailzie. So I marked him to the
skirt of Thusis, yonder--in line with that needle across the gulf
and, through it, to that bunch of pinkish-stemmed pines--there
where the brook falls into silver dust above that gorge. He'll lie
there. Just before daybreak he'll mount to the top of one of those
pines. We'll hear his yelping. That's our only chance at him."
"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!"