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."