It was his last shot, however. He had a heavy clasp-knife such as salmon-anglers carry. He laid his empty pistols on the rocky ledge. Very patiently he felt for frost-loosened masses of rock, detached them one by one and noiselessly piled them along the ledge.
“It’s odd,” he thought to himself: “I’m going to be killed and I don’t care. If Isla got HER, then I’ll see her very soon now, God willing. But if she wins out — why it is going to be longer waiting…. And I’ve put my mark on the Boche — not as often as I wished — but I’ve marked some of them for what they’ve done to me — and to the world—”
A sound caught his ear. He waited, listening. Had it been a fighting chance in Isla Water he’d have taken it. But the man in the boat! — and to have one’s throat cut — like a deer! No! He’d kill all he could first; he’d die fighting, not fleeing.
He looked at his wrist-watch. Miss Erith had been gone two hours.
That meant that her slender body lay deep, deep in icy Isla.
Now, listening intently, he heard the bracken stirring and something scraping the gorse below. They were coming; they were among the rocks! He straightened up and hurled a great slab of rock down through darkness; heard them scrambling upward still; seized slab after slab and smashed them downward at the flashes as the red flare of their pistols lit up his figure against the sky.
Then, as he hurled the last slab and clutched his short, broad knife, a gasping breath fell on his cheek and a wet and icy little hand thrust a box of clips into his. And there and then The McKay almost died, for it was as if the “Cold Hand of Isla” had touched him. And he stared ahead to see his own wraith.
“Quick!” she panted. “We can hold them, Kay!”
“Yellow-hair! By God! You bet we can!” he cried with a terrible burst of laughter; and ripped the clips from the box and snapped them in with lightning speed.
Then his pistols vomited vermilion, clearing the rock of vermin; and when two fresh clips were snapped in, the man stood on the Pulpit’s edge, mad for blood, his fierce young eyes searching the blackness about him.
“You dirty rats!” he cried, “come back! Are you leaving your dead in the bracken then?”
There were distant sounds on the moor; nothing stirred nearer.
“Are you coming back?” he shouted, “or must I go after you?”
Suddenly in the night their motor roared. At the same moment, far across the lake, he saw the headlights of other motors glide over Isla Bridge like low-flying stars.
“Yellow-hair!”
There was no sound behind him. He turned.
The fainting girl lay amid her drenched yellow hair in the ferns, partly covered by the clothing which she had drawn over her with her last conscious effort.
It is a long way across Isla Water. And twice across is longer. And
“The Cold Hand of Isla” summons the chief of Clan Morhguinn when his
time has come to look upon his own wraith face to face. But The Cold
Hand of Isla had touched this girl in vain — MOLADH MAIRI!!
“Yellow-hair! Yellow-hair!” he whispered. The roar of rushing motors from Glenark filled his ears. He picked up one of her little hands and chafed it. Then she opened her golden eyes, looked up at him, and a flood of rose dyed her body from brow to ankle.
“It — it is a long way across Isla Water,” she stammered. “I’m very tired — Kay!”
“You below there!” shouted McKay. “Are there constables among you?”
“Aye, sir!” came the loud response amid the roar of running engines.
“Then there’ll be whiskey and blankets, I’m thinkin’!” cried McKay.
“Aye, blankets for the dead if there be any!”
“Kick ’em into the whinns and bring what ye bring for the living!” said McKay in a loud, joyous voice. “And if you’ve petrol and speed take the Banff road and be on your way, for the Boche are crawling to cover, and it’s fine running the night! Get on there, ye Glenark beagles! And leave a car behind for me and mine!”
A constable, shining his lantern, came clumping up the Pulpit. McKay snatched the heavy blankets and with one mighty movement swept the girl into them.
Half-conscious she coughed and gasped at the whiskey, then lay very still as McKay lifted her in his arms and strode out under the paling stars of Isla.
CHAPTER VI
MOUNT TERRIBLE
Toward the last of May a handsome young man wearing a smile and the uniform of an American Intelligence Officer arrived at Delle, a French village on the Franco-Swiss frontier.
His credentials being satisfactory he was directed by the Major of Alpinists commanding the place to a small stucco house on the main street.
Here he inquired for a gentleman named Number Seventy. The gentleman’s other name was John Recklow, and he received the Intelligence Officer, locked the door, and seated himself behind his desk with his back to the sunlit window, and one drawer of his desk partly open.
Credentials being requested, and the request complied with accompanied by a dazzling smile, there ensued a silent interval of some length during which the young man wearing the uniform of an American Intelligence Officer was not at all certain whether Recklow was examining him or the papers of identification.
After a while Recklow nodded: “You came through from Toul, Captain?”
“From Toul, sir,” with the quick smile revealing dazzling teeth.
“Matters progress?”
“It is quiet there.”
“So I understand,” nodded Recklow. “There’s blood on your uniform.”
“A scratch — a spill from my motor-cycle.”
Recklow eyed the cut on the officer’s handsome face. One of the young officer’s hands was bandaged, too.
“You’ve been in action, Captain.”
“No, sir.”
“You wear German shoes.”
The officer’s brilliant smile wrinkled his good-looking features:
“There was some little loot: I’m wearing my share.”
Recklow nodded and let his cold eyes rest on the identification papers.
Then, slowly, and without a word, he passed them back over the desk.
The Intelligence Officer stuffed them carelessly into his side-pocket.
“I thought I’d come over instead of wiring or ‘phoning. Our people have not come through yet, have they?”
“Which people, sir?”
“McKay and Miss Erith.”
“No, not yet.”
The officer mused for a moment, then: “They wired me from Paris yesterday, so they’re all right so far. You’ll see to it personally that they get through the Swiss wire, won’t you?”
“Through or over, sir.”
The Intelligence Officer displayed his mirthful teeth:
“Thanks. I’m also sending three of my own people through the wire. They’ll have their papers in order — here are the duplicates I issued; they’ll have their photographs on the originals.”
He fished out a batch of papers and laid them on Recklow’s desk.
“Who are these people?” demanded Recklow.
“Mine, sir.”
“Oh.”
There fell a silence; but Recklow did not examine the papers; he merely pocketed them.
“I think that’s all,” said the Intelligence Officer. “You know my name — Captain Herts. In case you wish to communicate just wire my department at Toul. They’ll forward anything if I’m away on duty.”
He saluted: Recklow followed him to the door, saw him mount his motor-cycle — a battered American machine — stood there watching until he was out of sight.
Hour after hour that afternoon Recklow sat in his quiet little house in Delle poring over the duplicate papers.
About five o’clock he called up Toul by telephone and got the proper department.
“Yes,” came the answer, “Captain Herts went to you this morning on a confidential matter…. No, we don’t know when he will return t
o Toul.”
Recklow hung up, walked slowly out into his little garden and, seating himself on a green bench, took out the three packets of duplicate papers left him by Captain Herts. Then he produced a jeweller’s glass and screwed it into his right eye.
Several days later three people — two men and a young woman — arrived at Delle, were conveyed under military escort to the little house of Mr. Recklow, remained closeted with him until verification of their credentials in duplicate had been accomplished, then they took their departure and, that evening, they put up at the Inn.
But by the next morning they had disappeared, presumably over the Swiss wire — that being their destination as revealed in their papers. But the English touring-car which brought them still remained in the Inn garage. Recklow spent hours examining it.
Also the arrival and the departure of these three people was telephoned to Toul by Recklow, but Captain Herts still remained absent from Toul on duty and his department knew nothing about the details of the highly specialised and confidential business of Captain Herts.
So John Recklow went back to his garden and waited, and smoked a short, dirty clay pipe, and played with his family of cats.
Once or twice he went down at night to the French wire. All the sentries were friends of his.
“Anybody been through?” he inquired.
The answer was always the same: Nobody had been through as far as the patrol knew.
“Where the hell,” muttered Recklow, “did those three guys go?”
A nightingale sang as he sauntered homeward. Possibly, being a French nightingale, she was trying to tell him that there were three people lying very still in the thicket near her.
But men are stupid and nightingales are too busy to bother about trifles when there is courting to be done and nests to be planned and all the anticipated excitement of the coming new moon to preoccupy a love-distracted bird.
On a warm, sunny day early in June, toward three o’clock in the afternoon, a peloton of French cavalry en vidette from Delle stopped a rather rickety touring-car several kilometres west of the Swiss frontier and examined the sheaf of papers offered for their inspection by the young man who drove the car.
A yellow-haired girl seated beside him leaned back in her place indifferently to relax her limbs.
From the time she and the young man had left Glenark in Scotland their progress had been a series of similar interruptions. Everywhere on every road soldiers, constables, military policemen, and gentlemen in mufti had displayed, with varying degrees of civility, a persistent curiosity to inspect such papers as they carried.
On the Channel transport it was the same; the same from Dieppe to Paris; from Paris to Belfort; and now, here within a pebble’s toss of the Swiss frontier, military curiosity concerning their papers apparently remained unquenched.
The sous-officier of dragoon-lancers sat his splendid horse and gravely inspected the papers, one by one. Behind him a handful of troopers lolled in their saddles, their lances advanced, their horses swishing their tails at the murderous, green-eyed bremsers which, like other bloodthirsty Teutonic vermin, had their origin in Germany, and raided both French and Swiss frontiers to the cruel discomfort of horses and cattle.
Meanwhile the blond, perplexed boy who was examining the papers of the two motorists, scratched his curly head and rubbed his deeply sunburned nose with a sunburned fist, a visible prey to indecision. Finally, at his slight gesture, his troopers trotted out and formed around the touring-car.
The boyish sous-officier looked pleasantly at the occupants of the car: “Have the complaisance to follow me — rather slowly if you please,” he said; wheeled his horse, and trotted eastward toward the roofs of a little hamlet visible among the trees of the green and rolling countryside.
The young man threw in his clutch and advanced slowly, the cavalry trotting on either side with lances in stirrup-boots and slanting backward from the arm-loops.
There was a barrier beyond and some Alpine infantry on guard; and to the left, a paved street and houses. Half-way down this silent little street they halted: the sous-officier dismounted and opened the door of the tonneau, politely assisting the girl to alight. Her companion followed her, and the sous-officier conducted them into a stucco house, the worn limestone step of which gave directly on the grass-grown sidewalk.
“If your papers are in order, as they appear to be,” said the youthful sous-officier, “you are expected in Delle. And if it is you indeed whom we expect, then you will know how to answer properly the questions of a gentleman in the adjoining room who is perhaps expecting you.” And the young sous-officier opened a door, bowed them into the room beyond, and closed the door behind them. As they entered this room a civilian of fifty, ruddy, powerfully but trimly built, and wearing his white hair clipped close, rose from a swivel chair behind a desk littered with maps and papers.
“Good-afternoon,” he said in English. “Be seated if you please. And if you will kindly let me have your papers — thank you.”
When the young man and the girl were seated, their suave and ruddy host dropped back onto his swivel chair. For a long while he sat there absently caressing his trim, white moustache, studying their papers with unhurried and minute thoroughness.
Presently he lifted his cold, greyish eyes but not his head, like a man looking up over eyeglasses:
“You are this Kay McKay described here?” he inquired pleasantly. But in his very clear, very cold greyish eyes there was something suggesting the terrifying fixity of a tiger’s.
“I am the person described,” said the young man quietly.
“And you,” turning only his eyes on the young girl, “are Miss Evelyn
Erith?”
“I am.”
“These, obviously, are your photographs?”
McKay smiled: “Obviously.”
“Certainly. And all these other documents appear to be in order” — he laid them carelessly on his desk— “IF,” he added, “Delle is your ultimate destination and terminal.”
“We go farther,” said McKay in a low voice.
“Not unless you have something further to offer me in the way of credentials,” said the ruddy, white-haired Mr. Recklow, smiling his terrifying smile.
“I might mention a number,” began McKay in a voice still lower, “if you are interested in the science of numbers!”
“Really. And what number do you think might interest me?”
“Seventy-six — for example.”
“Oh,” said the other; “in that case I shall mention the very interesting number, Seventy. And you, Miss Erith?” turning to the yellow-haired girl. “Have you any number to suggest that might interest me?”
“Seventy-seven,” she said composedly. Recklow nodded:
“Do you happen to believe, either of you, that, at birth, the hours of our lives are already irrevocably numbered?”
Miss Erith said: “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
Recklow got up, made them a bow, and reseated himself. He touched a handbell; the blond sous-officier entered.
“Everything is in order; take care of the car; carry the luggage to the two rooms above,” said Recklow.
To McKay and Miss Erith he added: “My name is John Recklow. If you want to rest before you wash up, your rooms are ready. You’ll find me here or in the garden behind the house.”
Toward sunset they found Recklow in the little garden, seated alone there on a bench looking up at the eastward mountains with the piercing, detached stare of a bird of prey. When they had seated themselves on the faded-green bench on either side of him he said, still gazing toward the mountains: “It’s April up there. Dress warmly.”
“Which is Mount Terrible?” inquired Miss Erith.
“Those are the lower ridges. The summit is not visible from where we sit,” replied Recklow. And, to McKay: “There’s some snow there still, I hear.”
McKay’s upward-turned face was a grim study. B
eyond those limestone shouldering heights his terrible Calvary had begun — a progress that had ended in the wreckage of mind and soul had it not been for Chance and Evelyn Erith. After Mount Terrible, with its grim “Great Secret,” had come the horrors of the prison camp at Holzminden and its nameless atrocities, his escape to New York, the Hun cipher orders to “silence him,” his miraculous rescue and redemption by the girl at his side — and now their dual mission to probe the mystery of Mount Terrible.
“McKay,” said Recklow, “I don’t know what the particular mission may be that brings you and Miss Erith to the Franco-Swiss frontier. I have been merely instructed to carry out your orders whenever you are in touch with me. And I am ready to do so.”
“How much do you know about us?” asked McKay, turning to him an altered face almost marred by hard features which once had been only careworn and stern.
“I know you escaped from the Holzminden prison-camp in Germany; that you were inhumanly treated there by the Boche; that you entered the United States Intelligence Service; and that, whatever may be your business here, I am to help further it at your request.” He looked at the girl: “As concerning Miss Erith, I know only that she is in the same Government service as yourself and that I am to afford her any aid she requests.”
McKay said, slowly: “My orders are to trust you implicitly. On one subject only am I to remain silent — I am not to confide to anybody the particular object which brings us here.”
Recklow nodded: “I understood as much. Also I have been instructed that the Boches are determined to discover your whereabouts and do you in before your mission is accomplished. You, probably, are aware of that, McKay?”
“Yes, I am.”
“By the way — you know a Captain Herts?”
“Not personally.”
“You’ve been in communication with him?”
“Yes, for some time.”
“Did you wire him from Paris last Thursday?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you wire him?”
“At his apartment at Toul.”
“All right. He was here on Friday…. Somehow I feel uneasy…. He has a way of smiling too brilliantly…. I suppose, after these experiences I’ll remain a suspicious grouch all my life — but his papers were in order… I don’t know just why I don’t care for that type of man…. You’re bound for somewhere or other via Mount Terrible, I understand?”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 904