by John Buchan
Sometimes she turned round and nodded friendlily to the man behind. He sat rigid and expectant, his sullen eyes watchful, and one hand in his coat pocket.
It was a great thing to have Amos beside her. She talked to him in a loud voice about the road and the weather, so that Franz might hear, but interpolated in her remarks some words in a lower tone. Amos responded. He modulated his great voice to a whisper and that whisper was in the broadest Scots.
“We maun find the richt kind o’ place,” he crooned, “and then I’ll pretend to be no weel. I’ll gie ye the word when I see a likely bit. You leave the rest to me, mem. . . . Dinna you stop the engine. . . . This cawr is a fine starter, and it accelerates brawly. . . . Watch me and play up till me, and God be kind to His ain.” When Amos, a bigoted unbeliever, dropped into the speech of piety, there was trouble awaiting somebody.
Before they were out of the Val d’Arras the wind dropped and the snow began, a steady resolute fall. There were people on the vile road — one or two men who might have been wood-cutters, and Jacqueline observed that they stared not at her but at Franz, and that some signal seemed to be exchanged. Once a fellow who looked like a gamekeeper dropped from the hillside, and the car was halted while he whispered to Franz over the back of it. Jacqueline preserved an air of aloof inattention, as if such a meeting were the most natural thing in the world.
After Colavella Franz proposed to drive. “Please let me go on,” Jacqueline protested. “I’m not in the least tired, and we shall be on better roads now. It is only driving that keeps me warm.” Franz consented with an ill grace, but he shifted his station so that he sat directly behind her.
Half an hour after leaving Colavella they came to a fork where the road to Chiavagno branched to the left.
“Straight on,” Franz commanded.
“But we are going to Chiavagno.”
“We are going where I direct. Do as I bid you, or I will take the wheel.”
The snow was thickening, and already it lay an inch or two on the highway. “We’ll have to do something soon,” Jacqueline whispered to Amos.
“Aye,” came grimly through closed teeth.
Soon after that he began to groan. He huddled himself into the left-hand corner and sat with shut eyes, so that Franz could see his profile. He had the appearance of a man in extreme distress.
Presently they turned down the side of a mountain torrent flowing in a deep-cut wooded ravine. Only a low wall protected the road from the gorge, and in parts the wall had crumbled into stone heaps.
Suddenly Amos cried out. He pawed feebly at Jacqueline’s arm. “Stop,” he groaned. “I’ve an awfu’ pain. Let me oot — let me oot.”
Jacqueline brought the car to a standstill. “What is it?” she asked anxiously.
Amos’s voice came small and weak between his gasps.
“Colic,” he answered. “It’s the cauld. Let me straughten mysel’ on the roadside. Oh, mem, for God’s sake!”
Franz was standing up, and demanding angrily the reason of the delay.
“My servant has been taken ill. He says he must be laid flat. Will you help him, please?”
Franz leaped from the car, and hauled out the groaning Amos, who staggered a step or two to the edge of the gorge and then fell flat among the snow. It was at a point where there was a gap in the protecting wall.
He bent over the prostrate figure and his face was wrathful.
“A nip o’ brandy,” Amos whined. “There’s a flask at the bottom o’ the big green poke.”
Franz addressed Jacqueline fiercely. “There is no time for doctoring. The fellow must lie here till he recovers. People will pass . . . he will be seen to. . . . Give me the wheel, madam. I now will drive. . . .”
His back was to the stricken man, and he was about to re-enter the car, when a strange thing happened. Amos drew his legs up with astonishing agility, and in a second was crouching like a broody fowl. Then he flung his enormous arms round Franz’s knees. To Jacqueline it seemed as if the body of the latter suddenly rose from the ground and described a curve backward in the air over Amos’s shoulder. It disappeared into the ravine, and could be heard crashing among the snow-laden undergrowth.
In an instant Amos was beside her, and the car was in motion. Amos dusted the snow from his disreputable breeks.
“That’s settled him,” he said complacently. “A dodge I learnt lang syne at the fit-ba’.”
After that there was no delay. Jacqueline swung to the left, cut across the road to Chiavagno and, after being at fault once or twice among the valleys of the foothills and consulting her map, struck the main road which led to the Val Saluzzana. There the snow lightened, but much had fallen, and the pine-woods were white like the mountain tops. But on the broad highway it was little hindrance to speed, and by four o’clock they had passed Santa Chiara. The temporary clearness of the air enabled her without difficulty to follow Adam’s directions, and presently she had drawn up at the mouth of the gorge which led to the col and to the Val d’Arras. She could see the faint outline of the track which followed the stream.
Amos descended, stamped his feet, and swung his arms. “I’ll gang a wee bit up the burn to meet them,” he said. “Losh, it’s a fearsome-lookin’ glen! Yon puir Creevey will hae an ill journey.”
Jacqueline watched his gnome-like figure stumping up the track till it disappeared among the draggled pines. . . . The place was hushed and solitary. She saw the highway bearing to the right for the Staub pass, the road that was to carry them to safety. In front was the sword-cut of the upper Val Saluzzana, and she could make out dimly the gap which was the Colle delle Rondini and the famous ice-ridge of the Pomagognon. . . . But her eyes were chiefly on the cleft which led to the col. The twilight was falling, and above the pines and the fitful gleams of white water she saw nothing but a pit of shade across which blew thin streamers of mist. That was the way of salvation. Out of that darkness would presently come two men on whom the fate of the world depended. They must come — they could not fail — not if there was hope on earth or mercy in heaven. But as she peered up into that savage wilderness she shivered.
Suddenly she caught sight of Amos. He was far up on a jut of crag and he was looking towards her. He was waving his hand. He had seen them.
Relief made her choke and filled her eyes with happy tears. She started the engine.
III
Scarcely a word was spoken between Adam and Creevey for the first half-hour. With difficulty they crossed the torrent at a place where the gorge flattened out and the water ran wide and shallow before plunging into a new abyss. After that the way lay along the east slope of the valley in a chaos of fallen rocks and straggling pines. Creevey, like all novices, forced the pace, but Adam made him fall back into a slow, steady stride. “We have a long road before us,” he said. “You must keep your breath for the hills.”
Under the lee of the slope it was still very dark, and Adam had to take the other’s arm at many points to help him over clefts hidden by scrub. He was straining his ears for sounds from the other side of the stream, from the track that led to the pass, something that would tell him that their enemies had crossed the mountains. That route was easy even in the darkness for hardened mountaineers. But the noise of furious water and the soughing of the dawn wind blanketed all other sounds. The light in the inn was soon hidden from them, and they moved in a shell of loneliness.
Adam was in such a mood as he had not known before. He was supremely confident. He felt that his task was nearing fulfilment, like a runner who has entered the straight with the tape clear before him. He had no fear of failure, so that he did not attempt to forecast the next difficult stages. These would be surmounted — somehow or other Creevey that night would be beyond the reach of danger. A new Creevey, too, for the gods would not leave their work half done. . . . But to this assurance happiness had been added, and in recent years he had known peace, but not happiness. Now something jubilant and ecstatic seemed to have been re-born in him, and he wa
s aware of the reason. He had discovered tenderness, for Jacqueline had taught him. She had thawed his chilly, dutiful soul. He was no longer content to pity humanity, for he had come to love it. Creevey, stumbling along at his side, was not merely a pawn in the game to be guarded, but a friend and a fellow. The aching affection which had once been confined to Nigel was now given to Jacqueline, and through her to all mankind. “I am a full man and a free man again,” he told himself. “I have come out of the shadows.”
The slopes on which they moved bent inward, and down the cleft in the mountains there came the first grey light of dawn. “Thank God,” said Adam. “We are now in cover. We must take it quietly, for we have four thousand feet to climb to the col.”
Adam led at a slow even pace up a track which was only a deeper shadow among the shadowy fern. Here the wind was cut off, and the snow, warded off by the pines, lay thinly on the ground, but it was damply cold, as if the trees still held the chill of midnight. It was steep going, but not difficult, though Creevey’s heavy breathing soon proved the poverty of his training. It was Adam’s business to keep him cheerful, for he knew the potent effect of the mind on the body.
“You are doing famously,” he told him. “After the trees we have the first shelf where the slope eases off. Then there comes a bit of a scramble, and then a second shelf. After that we must hug the stream till it stops, and the last bit is slabs and screes. The snow should be lying there fairly deep and that will help us. Then we are at the col and there’s no more climbing. The descent into the Val Saluzzana is longer, but far less stiff. In two hours from the col we should be in the valley.”
“You think that Lady Warmestre will be there?”
“I am certain of it.”
“You’re a queer fellow,” said Creevey. “You go a good deal by instinct. . . . Perhaps you are right. . . . I’m not built that way.”
They came out of the trees to the lip of the first shelf. There the track, to avoid an out-jutting crag, bent to the right, and reached a vantage point from which the valley beneath could be seen. It was here that the night before Adam had first caught the lights of the inn. He made Creevey keep low in cover, and wriggled forward to where he could rake the trough of the Val d’Arras.
There was no one on the road which led to the pass, nor on the road below the inn, as far as he could see it. Outside the inn itself stood a solitary figure. The glass told him that it was neither Jacqueline nor Amos. It was a tall man, and he had the air of being on guard. As Adam watched him, he shaded his eyes and seemed to be watching something to the east in the valley bottom.
The, enemy had come. More, some of them were now down by the stream. They might be only casting about for the fugitives; on the other hand, they might have found the spoor down the rib of rock which would show up in the snow. They were bound to have skilled trackers with them, men accustomed to the winter trails of bouquetin and chamois.
Adam snapped his glasses back into their case. “We must push on,” he said. “Our friends are below at the inn. They may pick up our trail.”
“Are they faster than us?”
“Than us two? Perhaps twice as fast. But we have a long start. Never fear, we shall beat them.”
Creevey seemed to have exhausted his strength on the first steeps. He had not the mountaineer’s gift of walking delicately in difficult places, and he slipped and stumbled among the boulder-strewn herbage and several times fell heavily. Adam took his arm and forced the pace, so that when they reached the place where the stream fell in great leaps down a broken rock-wall he was puffing hard and limping.
In summer there was a faint track up this wall, but there was no sign of it now in the waste of glazed rock, snowy cracks and boggy ledges. Creevey was most of the time on his knees, for he retched with vertigo whenever he rose to his feet. Over most of the ground Adam simply dragged him, blaming himself bitterly for not having brought a rope. Sometimes they came to an impasse up which Creevey had to be lifted like baggage. His crawling soaked him to the skin, and it was a limp and sodden figure that dropped on the ground when the second shelf was reached.
“Get your breath,” Adam told him. Creevey lay flat on his back looking up to the sky from which occasional flakes fell, while Adam made a short detour to the right, to a point where from a steep overhang he believed that a view could be got of the foot of the ravine where it debouched on the valley.
He got the view and something more, something which sent him racing back to Creevey. For on the spit of open sward below the trees, on the track by which they had come, he saw four figures, their heads bent like dogs following a trail.
He plucked Creevey to his feet. “On,” he cried, “the hounds are out. At the speed they go they are less than an hour behind us.”
The words woke the other’s drugged mind to life. Never before had he known what it was to be in physical danger. He, the assured and authoritative, was being hunted like a fox, and the price of failure was death. He felt a cold clutch at his heart, but a new nervous power in his limbs. This shelf was more difficult than the first, but there was no drag on Adam’s arm. Creevey covered the ground at a shamble which was almost running. “Don’t strain yourself,” said Adam’s quiet voice in his ear. “We shall win all right”; but the sense of the words hardly penetrated to a brain obsessed with the passion of flight.
They were now at the last tier of the ascent, where at points, to avoid knuckles of sheer cliff, it was necessary to take to the bed of the infant stream. A round of the clock before Adam had descended the place like a falling stone, leaping in the strong moonlight from boulder to boulder. But now the rocks were more glazed and treacherous, and the snow, which was falling thickly, made the route harder to prospect. There were points where Adam simply took Creevey in his arms and jumped with him; others where he forced him up the tiny couloirs on his shoulders. It was a toil which few men could have compassed, but he scarcely felt it — at long last he was finding use for that physical strength which he had so jealously conserved. As he clutched the dripping, inert body of his companion, he felt a strange affection. This sodden thing, so feeble and yet so precious!
The stream ceased, a few hundred yards of snowy screes followed, and then they stood in the throat of the col. Adam let Creevey drop on the ground, and looked at his watch. It was a little after one o’clock.
The consciousness of having reached the summit seemed to rouse Creevey to a new vigour. He swallowed some brandy from Adam’s flask and found his voice.
“Will the snow help us?” The words came from blue lips. “Will it hide us? What about leaving the road?”
“There is no route but the one, and these men could follow tracks in any weather.”
“Then for God’s sake let us get on.” He started down-hill at a stumbling run. So far the wind, which was from the north, had been shut off by a wall of mountain, but the ravine on the Val Saluzzana side took a northward turn, and they had now the drift in their faces. Adam caught the other’s arm, for the way down the long broken moraine was not easy, but his help was scarcely needed. Creevey had got a new reserve of vigour with the downward slope, his foothold was surer, and his face, plastered with the drift, was human again. On the last stage it had been washed clean of life like a sick animal’s.
“How much longer?” he gasped.
“Two hours — not more. If the snow lasts we shall be safe, for it will prevent them shooting.”
Then the wind seemed to be shut off again, and they moved in a soft feathery blanket. Creevey spoke.
“I did not know the world was so savage,” he muttered, and it sounded like an apology.
“It is very near the edge,” said Adam.
“You think I have helped to bring it to the edge? . . . That is what Loeffler believes. . . . I thought it hysteria — he has a good many blind patches in his mind. . . . But he was right. . . . If we come through, you and I . . . I will go to Loeffler.”
“Don’t try to talk,” Adam said. “You will want all your
strength.” The snow muffled sounds, and they moved in a world of deathly stillness, but he had the sense of proximity which wild things have, and it told him that the enemy had passed the col and were on the moraine. The hunters were faster by far than the hunted.
The snow was thinning. Presently they struck the torrent which came down from a tributary ravine, and the road now was in a narrow gully. The wind caught them again, and their immediate environs were blown clear — the beetling cliffs on their left, like chocolate dusted with sugar, the leaping white water, the icy ledge lipped by it where the track lay. . . .
Adam looked back, and saw that the moraine by which they had come was visible almost as far as the col. There were figures on it, moving fast like plover in a spring plough. Half a mile behind — less. Within the next half-hour they must be overtaken.
A dozen plans flitted through his brain as he dragged Creevey down the gully. The latter had gone numb again, and was maintained only by the other’s resolution. They were taking crazy chances, and again and again Adam’s arm saved him from disaster. But no audacity could avail them, for the relentless trackers behind were their masters in pace, and the trail was for a child to read. Creevey’s breath was labouring and he was stumbling drunkenly. Where was a hope, for hope there must be? They could not fail on the brink of success.
Suddenly they came to a point which Adam remembered. A huge boulder on the right was delicately poised above the track. He recollected it clearly, for here he had had to walk warily, since a very little would have sent it crashing down to block the route for ever. A man could dislodge it — a man on the upper side — and bar any further descent. But that man must remain on the near side of the chasm which he had created. He would be shut off himself from reaching the valley.