"W-what!" stammered the girl. But Skelton, inarticulate with rage, began striking her and jerking her about as though he were trying to tear her to pieces. Only when the girl reeled sideways, limp and deathly white under his fury, did he find his voice, or the hoarse unhuman rags of it: "Damn you!" he gasped, "you'll sell me out, will you? I'll show you! I'll fix you, you dirty slut--"
Suddenly he started up the path to the summit dragging the half-conscious girl. Macniff ran along on the other side to help.
"Wot y' goin' to do with her, Harry?" he panted. "I ain't got no stomach for scraggin' her. I ain't for no knifin'. W'y don't you shove her off the top?"
But Skelton strode on, half-dragging the girl, and muttering that she had sold him and that he knew how to "fix" a girl who double-crossed him.
And now the gaunt, black Crucifix came into view, stark against the paling eastern sky with its life-sized piteous figure hanging there under the crown of thorns.
Macniff looked up at the carved wooden image, then, at a word from Skelton, dropped the girl's limp arm.
The girl opened her eyes and stood swaying there, dazed.
Skelton began to laugh in an unearthly way: "Where the hell are you Germans?" he called out. "Come out of your holes, damn you. Here's one of your own kind who's sold us all out to the Yankees!"
Twice the girl tried to speak but Skelton shook the voice out of her quivering lips as a shadowy figure rose from the scrubby growth behind the Crucifix. Then another rose, another, and many others looming against the sky.
Macniff had begun to speak in German as they drew around him. Presently Skelton broke in furiously: "All right, then! That's the case. She sold us. She sold ME! But she's German. And it's your business. But if you Germans will listen to me you'll shove her against that pile of rocks and shoot her."
The girl had begun to cry now: "It's a lie! It's a lie!" she sobbed. "If it was Recklow who talked to me I didn't know it. I thought he was one of us, Harry! Don't go away! For God's sake, don't leave me with those men--"
Macniff sneered as he slouched by her: "They're Germans, ain't they? Wot are you squealin' for?"
"Harry! Harry!" she wailed--for her own countrymen had her now, held her fast, thrust a dozen pig-eyed scowling visages close to hers, muttering, making animal sounds at her.
Once she screamed. But Skelton seated himself on a rock, his back toward her, his head buried in his hands.