He laid her on the moss, well screened by the granite barrier, and beyond range of the brook's rainbow spray. She was already asleep again.
He took off both her shoes, unwound the spiral puttees and gave her bruised little feet a chance to breathe.
He made camp, tested the wind and found it safe to build a fire, set water to simmer, and unpacked the tinned rations. Then he made the two beds side by side, laying down blankets and smoothing away the twigs underneath.
The surviving carrier pigeon was hungry. He fed it, lifted it still banded from its place, cleaned the cage and set it to dry in a patch of sunshine.
The four automatic pistols he loaded and laid on a shelf in the granite barricade; set ammunition and flashlight beside them.
Then he went to his pack and got his papers and material, and unrolled the map upon which he had been at work since he and Evelyn Erith had entered the enemy's zone of operations.
From time to time as he worked, drawing or making notes, he glanced at the sleeping girl beside him.
Never but once had the word "love" been mentioned between these two.
For a long while, now--almost from the very beginning--he had known that he was in love with this girl; but, after that one day in the garden, he also knew that there was scarcely the remotest chance that he should live to tell her so again, or that she could survive to hear him.
For when they had entered the enemy's zone below Mount Terrible they both realised that there was almost no chance of their returning.
He had lighted his pipe; and now he sat working away at his drawings, making a map of his route as best he could without instruments, and noting with rapid pencil all matters of interest for those upon whose orders he and this girl beside him had penetrated the forbidden forest of Les Errues. This for the slim chance of getting back alive. But he had long believed that, if his pigeons failed him at the crisis, no report would ever be delivered to those who sent him here, either concerning his discoveries or his fate and the fate of the girl who lay asleep beside him.
An hour later she awoke. He was still bent over his map, and she presently extended one arm and let her hand rest on his knee.
"Do you feel better, Yellow-hair?"
"Yes. Thank you for removing my shoes."
"I suppose you are hungry," he remarked.
"Yes. Are you?"
He smiled: "As usual. I wish to heaven I could run across a roebuck." They both craved something to satisfy the hunger made keen by the Alpine air, and which no concentrated rations could satisfy. McKay seldom ventured to kill any game--merely an auerhahn, a hare or two, a red squirrel--and sometimes he had caught trout in the mountain brooks with his bare hands--the method called "tickling" and only too familiar to Old-World poachers.