The girl took his hand confidingly and walked beside him, holding one arm before her face to shield her eyes from branches in the darkness.
They had gone, perhaps, a dozen paces when a man stepped from behind a great beech-tree, peered after them, then turned and hurried down the slope to where the Swiss wire stretched glistening under the stars. He ran along this wire until he came to the dry bed of a torrent.
Up this he stumbled under the forest patches of alternate moonlight and shadow until he came to a hard path crossing it on a masonry viaduct.
“Harry!” he called in a husky, quavering voice, choking for breath.
“Cripes, Harry — where in hell are you?”
“Here, you blighter! What’s the bully row? Where’s Helsa—”
“With Recklow!”
“What!!”
“Double-crossed us!” he whispered; “I seen her! I was huntin’ along the fence when I come on them, thick as thieves. She’s crossed us; she’s hollered! Oh, Cripes, Harry, Helsa has went an’ squealed!”
“HELSA!”
“Yes, Helsa — I wouldn’t ‘a’ believed it! But I seen ‘em. I seen ’em whispering. I seen her take his hand an’ lead him up through the trees. She’s squealed on us! She’s bringing Recklow—”
“Recklow! Are you sure?”
“I got closte to ‘em. There was enough moonlight to spot him by. I know the cut of him, don’t I? That wuz him all right.” He wiped his face on his sleeve. “Now what are we goin’ to do?” he demanded brokenly. “Where do we get off, Harry?”
Skelton appeared dazed:
“The slut,” he kept repeating without particular emphasis, “the little slut! I thought she’d fallen for me. I thought she was my girl. And now to do that! And now to go for to do us in like that—”
“Well, we’re all right, ain’t we?” quavered Macniff. “We make our getaway all right, don’t we? Don’t we?”
“I can’t understand—”
“Say, listen, Harry. To blazes with Helsa! She’s hollered and that ends her. But can we make our getaway? And how about them Germans waitin’ for us by that there crucifix on top of this mountain? Where do they get off? Does this guy, Recklow, get them?”
“He can’t get six men alone.”
“Well, can’t he sic the Swiss onto ‘em?”
A terrible doubt arose in Skelton’s mind: “Recklow wouldn’t come here alone. He’s got his men in these woods! That damn woman fixed all this. It’s a plant! She’s framed us! What do I care about the Germans on the mountain! To hell with them. I’m going!”
“Where?”
“Into Alsace. Where do you think?”
“You gotta cross the mountain, then — or go back into France.”
But neither man dared do that now. There was only one way out, and that lay over Mount Terrible — either directly past the black crucifix towering from its limestone cairn on the windy peak, or just below through a narrow belt of woods.
“It ain’t so bad,” muttered Macniff. “If the Germans up there catch
McKay and the girl they’ll kill ’em and clear out.”
“Yes, but they don’t know that the Americans have crossed the wire.
The neck of woods is open!”
“McKay may go over the peak.”
“McKay knows this mountain,” grumbled Skelton. “He’s a fox, too. You don’t think he’d travel an open path, do you? And how can we catch him now? We were to have warned the Germans that the two had crossed the wire and then our only chance was to string out across that neck of woods between the peak and the cliffs. That’s the way McKay will travel, not on a path in full moonlight. Aw — I’m sick — what with Helsa doing that to me — I can’t get over it!”
Macniff started nervously and began to run along the path, upward:
“Beat it, Harry,” he called back over his shoulder; “it’s the only way out o’ this now.”
“God,” whimpered Skelton, “if I ever get my hooks on Helsa!” His voice ended in a snivel but his features were white and ferocious as he started running to overtake Macniff.
Recklow, breathing easily, his iron frame insensible to any fatigue from the swift climb, halted finally at the base of the abrupt slope which marked the beginning of the last ascent to the summit.
The girl, Helsa, speechless from exertion, came reeling up among the rocks and leaned gasping against a pine.
“Now,” said Recklow, “you can wait here for your two friends. We’ve come by a short cut and they won’t be here for more than half an hour. What’s the matter? Are you ill?” for the girl, overcome by the speed of the ascent, had dropped to the ground at the foot of the tree and sat there, her head resting against the trunk. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing convulsively.
“Are you ill?” he repeated, bending over her.
She heard him, opened her eyes, then shook her head faintly.
“All right. You’re a brave girl. You’ll get your breath in a few minutes. There’s no hurry. You can take your time. Your friends will be along in half an hour or so. Wait here for them. I am going on to warn the Germans by the Crucifix that the two Americans are across the Swiss wire.”
The girl, still speechless, wiped the blinding sweat from her eyes and tried to clear the dishevelled hair from her face. Then, with a great effort she found her voice:
“But the — Americans — will pass — first!” she gasped. “I can’t — stay here alone.”
“If they do pass, what of it? They can’t see you. Let them pass. We hold the summit and the neck of the woods. Tell that to Macniff and Skelton when they come; that’s what I want you here for. I want to cut off the Yankees’ retreat. Do you understand?”
“I — understand,” she breathed.
“You’ll carry out my orders?”
She nodded, strove to straighten up, then with both hands on her breast she sank back utterly exhausted. Recklow looked at her a moment in grim silence, then turned and walked away.
After a few steps he crossed his arms with a quick, peculiar movement and drew from under his armpits the pair of automatic pistols.
Like all “forested” forests, the woods on that flank of Mount Terrible were regular and open — big trees with no underbrush and a smooth carpet of needles and leaves under foot. And Recklow now walked on very fast in the dim light until he came to a thinning among the trees where just ahead of him, stars shimmered level in the vast sky-gulf above Alsace.
Here was the precipice; here the narrow, wooded neck — the only way across the mountain except by the peak path and the Crucifix.
Now Recklow took from his pockets his spool of very fine wire, attached it low down to a slim young pine, carried it across to the edge of the cliff, and attached the other end to a sapling on the edge of the ledge. On this wire he hung his cowbell and hooked the little clapper inside.
Then, squatting down on the pine needles, he sat motionless as one of the forest shadows, a pistol in either hand, and his cold grey eyes ablaze.
So silvery the pools of light from the planets, so depthless the shadows, that the forest around him seemed but a vast mosaic in mother-of-pearl and ebony.
There was no sound, no murmur of cattle-bells from mountain pastures now, nothing stirring through the magic aisles where the matched columns of beech and pine towered in the perfect symmetry of all planted forests.
He had not been there very long; the luminous dial of his wrist-watch told him that — when, although he had heard no sound on the soft carpet of pine needles, something suddenly hit the wire and the cowbell tinkled in the darkness.
Recklow was on his feet in an instant and running south along the wire. It might have been a deer crossing to the eastern slope; it might have been the enemy; he could not tell; he could see nothing stirring. And there seemed to be nothing for him to do but to take his chances.
“McKay!” he called in a low voice.
Then, amid the checkered pools of light and shade among the trees a shadow moved.<
br />
“McKay! It’s Number Seventy. If it’s you, call out your number, because I’ve got you over my sights and I shoot straight!”
“Seventy-six and Seventy-seven!” came McKay’s cautious voice. “Good heavens, Recklow, why have you come up here?”
“Don’t touch the wire again,” Recklow warned him. “Drop flat both of you, and crawl under! Crawl toward my voice!”
As he spoke he came toward them; and they rose from their knees among the shadows, pistols drawn.
“There’s been some dirty business,” said Recklow briefly. “Three
enemy spies went over the Swiss wire about an hour after you left
Delle. There are half a dozen Boches on the peak by the Crucifix.
And that’s why I’m here, if you want to know.”
There was a silence. Recklow looked hard at McKay, then at Evelyn
Erith, who was standing quietly beside him.
“Can we get through this neck of woods?” asked McKay calmly.
“We can hold our own here against a regiment,” said Recklow. “No Swiss patrol is likely to cross the summit before daybreak. So if our cowbell jingles again to-night after I have once called halt! — let the Boche have it.” To Evelyn he said: “Better step back here behind this ledge.” And, when McKay had followed, he told them exactly what had happened. “I’m afraid it’s not going to be very easy going for you,” he added.
With the alarming knowledge that they had to do once more with their uncanny enemies of Isla Water, McKay and Evelyn Erith looked at each other rather grimly. Recklow produced his clay pipe, inspected it, but did not venture to light it.
“I wonder,” he said carelessly, “what that she-Boche is doing over yonder by the summit path…. Her name is Helsa…. She’s not bad looking,” he added in a musing voice— “that young she-Boche. … I wonder what she’s up to now? Her people ought to be along pretty soon if they’ve travelled by the summit path from Delle.”
They had indeed travelled by the summit path — not ON it, but parallel to it through woods, over rocks, made fearful by what they believed to be the treachery of the girl, Helsa.
For this reason they dared not take the trodden way, dreading ambush. Yet they had to cross the peak; they dared not remain in a forest where they believed Recklow was hunting them with many men and their renegade comrade, Helsa, to guide them.
As they toiled upward, Macniff heard Skelton fiercely muttering sometimes, sometimes whining curses on this girl who had betrayed them both — who had betrayed him in particular. Over and over again he repeated his dreary litany: “No, by God, I didn’t think she’d do it to me. All I want is to get my hooks on her; that’s all I want — just that.”
Toward dawn they had reached the base of the cone where the last rocky slope slanted high above them.
“Cripes,” panted Macniff, “I can’t make that over them rocks! I gotta take it by the path. Wot’s the matter, Harry? Wot y’ lookin’ at?” he added, following Skelton’s fascinated stare. Then: “Well, f’r Christ’s sake!”
The girl, Helsa, was coming toward them through the trees.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “Have you seen the Americans? I’ve been waiting here beside the path. They haven’t passed. I met one of our agents in the woods — there was a misunderstanding at first—”
She stopped, stepped nearer, peered into Skelton’s shadowy face: “Harry! What’s the matter? Wh-why do you look at me that way — what are you doing! Let go of me—”
But Skelton had seized her by one arm and Macniff had her by the other.
“Are you crazy?” she demanded, struggling between them.
Skelton spoke first, but she scarcely recognised the voice for his:
“Who was that man you were talking to down by the Swiss wire?”
“I’ve told you. He’s one of us. His name is Wolkcer—”
“What!”
“Wolkcer! That is his name—”
“Spell it backward!” barked Skelton. “We know what you have done to us! You have sold us to Recklow! That’s what you done!”
“W-what!” stammered the girl. But Skelton, inarticulate with rage, began striking her and jerking her about as though he were trying to tear her to pieces. Only when the girl reeled sideways, limp and deathly white under his fury, did he find his voice, or the hoarse unhuman rags of it:
“Damn you!” he gasped, “you’ll sell me out, will you? I’ll show you!
I’ll fix you, you dirty slut—”
Suddenly he started up the path to the summit dragging the half-conscious girl. Macniff ran along on the other side to help.
“Wot y’ goin’ to do with her, Harry?” he panted. “I ain’t got no stomach for scraggin’ her. I ain’t for no knifin’. W’y don’t you shove her off the top?”
But Skelton strode on, half-dragging the girl, and muttering that she had sold him and that he knew how to “fix” a girl who double-crossed him.
And now the gaunt, black Crucifix came into view, stark against the paling eastern sky with its life-sized piteous figure hanging there under the crown of thorns.
Macniff looked up at the carved wooden image, then, at a word from
Skelton, dropped the girl’s limp arm.
The girl opened her eyes and stood swaying there, dazed.
Skelton began to laugh in an unearthly way: “Where the hell are you Germans?” he called out. “Come out of your holes, damn you. Here’s one of your own kind who’s sold us all out to the Yankees!”
Twice the girl tried to speak but Skelton shook the voice out of her quivering lips as a shadowy figure rose from the scrubby growth behind the Crucifix. Then another rose, another, and many others looming against the sky.
Macniff had begun to speak in German as they drew around him.
Presently Skelton broke in furiously:
“All right, then! That’s the case. She sold us. She sold ME! But she’s German. And it’s your business. But if you Germans will listen to me you’ll shove her against that pile of rocks and shoot her.”
The girl had begun to cry now: “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” she sobbed. “If it was Recklow who talked to me I didn’t know it. I thought he was one of us, Harry! Don’t go away! For God’s sake, don’t leave me with those men—”
Macniff sneered as he slouched by her: “They’re Germans, ain’t they?
Wot are you squealin’ for?”
“Harry! Harry!” she wailed — for her own countrymen had her now, held her fast, thrust a dozen pig-eyed scowling visages close to hers, muttering, making animal sounds at her.
Once she screamed. But Skelton seated himself on a rock, his back toward her, his head buried in his hands.
To his dull, throbbing ears came now only the heavy trample of boots among the rocks, guttural noises, a wrenching sound, then the clatter of rolling stones.
Macniff, squatting beside him, muttered uneasily, speculating upon what was being done behind him. But with German justice upon a German he had no desire to interfere, and he had no stomach to witness it, either.
“Why don’t they shoot her and be done?” he murmured huskily. And, later: “I can’t make out what they’re doing. Can you, Harry?”
But Skelton neither answered nor stirred. After a while he rose, not looking around, and strode off down the eastern slope, his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. Macniff slouched after him, listening for the end.
They had gone a mile, perhaps, when Skelton’s agonised voice burst its barriers: “I couldn’t — I couldn’t stand it — to hear the shots!”
“I ain’t heard no shots,” remarked Macniff.
There had been no shots fired….
And now in the ghastly light of dawn the Germans on Mount Terrible continued methodically the course of German justice.
Two of them, burly, huge-fisted, wrenched the Christ from the weather-beaten Crucifix which they had uprooted from the summit of its ancient cairn of rocks, and pulled out the rusty
spike-like nails.
The girl was already half dead when they laid her on the Crucifix and nailed her there. After they had raised the cross and set it on the summit she opened her eyes.
Several of the Germans laughed, and one of them threw pebbles at her until she died.
Just before sunrise they went down to explore the neck of woods, but found nobody. The Americans had been gone for a long time. So they went back to the cross where the dead girl hung naked against the sky and wrote on a bit of paper:
“Here hangs an enemy of Germany.”
And, the Swiss patrol being nearly due, they scattered, moving off singly, through the forest toward the frontier of the great German Empire.
A little later the east turned gold and the first sunbeam touched the Crucifix on Mount Terrible.
CHAPTER VII
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.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 906