Here for the first time they had come upon the startling spoor of man--of men and enemies--men who were hunting them to slay them, and who now, in these eastern woods, no longer cared for the concealment that might lull to a sense of false security the human quarry that they pursued.
And yet the Hun-pack hunting them though the forbidden forest of Les Errues had, in their new indifference to their quarry's alarm, and in the ferocity of their growing boldness, offered the two fugitives a new hope and a new reason for courage:--the grim courage of those who are about to die, and who know it, and still carry on.
For this is what the Huns had done--not daring to use signals visible to the Swiss patrols on nearer mountain flanks.
Nailed to a tree beside the scarcely visible trail of flattened leaves--a trail more imagined and feared than actually visible--was a sheet of white paper. And on it was written in the tongue of the Hun,--and in that same barbarous script also--a message, the free translation of which was as follows: "WARNING!"
The three Americans recently sent into Les Errues by the Military Intelligence Department of the United States Army now fighting in France are still at large somewhere in this forest. Two of them are operating together, the well-known escaped prisoner, Kay McKay, and the woman secret-agent, Evelyn Erith. The third American, Alexander Gray, has been wounded in the left hand by one of our riflemen, but managed to escape, and is now believed to be attempting to find and join the agents McKay and Erith.
This must be prevented. All German agents now operating in Les Errues are formally instructed to track down and destroy without traces these three spies whenever and wherever encountered according to plan. It is expressly forbidden to attempt to take any one or all of these spies alive. No prisoners! No traces! Germans, do your duty! The Fatherland is in peril!
(Signed) "HOCHSTIM."
McKay wriggled cautiously backward from the chasm's granite edge and crawled into the thicket of alpine roses where Evelyn Erith lay.
"No way out, Kay?" she asked under her breath.
"No way THAT way, Yellow-hair."
"Then?"
"I don't--know," he said slowly.
"You mean that we ought to turn back."
"Yes, we ought to. The forest is narrowing very dangerously for us. It runs to a point five miles farther east, overlooking impassable gulfs.... We should be in a cul-de-sac, Yellow-hair."
"I know."
He mused for a few moments, cool, clear-eyed, apparently quite undisturbed by their present peril and intent only on the mission which had brought them here, and how to execute it before their unseen trackers executed them.