"About."
"That's odd," said McKay thoughtfully. "I had believed I recognised this ravine. But these deep gulfs all look more or less alike. And I saw it only once and then under hair-raising circumstances."
Gray smiled, but Evelyn did not. McKay said: "So that's where they winged you, was it?"
"Yes. I was about to negotiate the slide--you remember the V-shaped slate cleft?"
"Yes."
"Well, I was just starting into that when the rifle cracked and I jumped for a tree with a broken wing and a bad scare."
"You saw the man?"
"I did later. He came over to look for dead game, and I ached to let him go; but it was too risky with Les Errues swarming alive with Boches, and me with the stomach-sickness of a shot-up man. Figure it out, McKay, for yourself."
"Of course, you did the wise thing and the right one."
"I think so. I travelled until I fainted." He turned and glanced around. "Strangely enough I saw black right here!--fell into this hole by accident, and have made it my home since then."
"It was a Godsend," said the girl.
"It was, Miss Erith," said Gray, resting his eloquent eyes on her.
"And you say," continued McKay, "that the Boche are sitting up day and night over that slide?"
"Day and night. The swine seem to know it's the only way out. I go every day, every night. Always the way is blocked; always I discover one or more of their riflemen there in ambush while the rest of the pack are ranging Les Errues."
"And yet," said McKay, "we've got to go that way, sooner or later."
There was a silence: then Gray nodded.
"Yes," he said, "but it is a question of waiting."
"There is a moon to-night," observed Evelyn Erith.
McKay lifted his head and looked at her gravely: Gray's blue eyes flashed his admiration of a young girl who quietly proposed to face an unknown precipice at night by moonlight under the rifles of ambushed men.
"After all," said McKay slowly, "is there ANY other way?"
In the silence which ensued Evelyn Erith, who had been lying between them on her stomach, her chin propped up on both hands, suddenly raised herself on one arm to a sitting posture.
Instantly Gray shrank back, white as a sheet, lifting his mutilated hand in its stiffened and bloody rags; and the girl gasped out her agonised apology: "Oh--CAN you forgive me! It was unspeakable of me!"
"It--it's all right," said Gray, the colour coming back to his face; but the girl in her excitement of self-reproach and contrition begged to be allowed to dress the mutilated hand which her own careless movement had almost crushed.