McKay's sombre eyes rested on his in grim comprehension of all that Recklow had left unsaid. Swift and savage as would be the fate of a man caught within German frontiers on any such business as he was now engaged in, the fate of a woman would be unspeakable.
If Miss Erith noticed or understood the silence between these two men she gave no sign of comprehension.
Soft, lovely lights lay across the mountains; higher rocks were still ruddy in the rays of the declining sun.
"Do the Boche planes ever come over?" asked McKay.
"They did in 1914. But the Swiss stopped it."
"Our planes--do they violate the frontier at all?"
"They never have, so far. Tell me, McKay, how about your maps?"
"Rather inaccurate--excepting one. I drew that myself from memory, and I believe it is fairly correct."
Recklow unfolded a little map, marked a spot on it with his pencil and passed it to McKay.
"It's for you," he said. "The sapling ladder lies under the filbert bushes in the gulley where I have marked the boundary. Wait till the patrol passes. Then you have ten minutes. I'll come later and get the ladder if the patrol does not discover it."
A cat and her kittens came into the garden and Evelyn Erith seated herself on the grass to play with them, an attention gratefully appreciated by that feline family.
The men watched her with sober faces. Perhaps both were susceptible to her beauty, but there was also about this young American girl in all the freshness of her unmarred youth something that touched them deeply under the circumstances.
For this clean, wholesome girl was enlisted in a service the dangers of which were peculiarly horrible to her because of the bestial barbarity of the Boche. From the Hun--if ever she fell into their hands--the greatest mercy to be hoped for was a swift death unless she could forestall it with a swifter one from her own pistol carried for that particular purpose.
The death of youth is always shocking, yet that is an essential part of war. But this was no war within the meaning accepted by civilisation--this crusade of light against darkness, of cleanliness against corruption, this battle of normal minds against the diseased, perverted, and filthy ferocity of a people not merely reverted to honest barbarism, but also mentally mutilated, and now morally imbecile and utterly incompetent to understand the basic truths of that civilisation from which they had relapsed, and from which, God willing, they are to be ultimately and definitely kicked out forever.
The old mother cat lay on the grass blinking pleasantly at the setting sun; the kittens frisked and played with the grass-stem in Evelyn Erith's fingers, or chased their own ratty little tails in a perfect orgy of feline excitement.