But it was the last of the soldiery on Mount Terrible; for dawn revealed their dead fire and a summit untenanted save by the stark and phantom crucifix looming through rising mists.
Evelyn Erith still slept; McKay fed the three carrier-pigeons, washed himself at the snow-rill in the woods, then went over to the crag's gritty edge under which for three days now the ghoulish clamour of a lammergeier had seldom ceased. And now, as McKay peered down, two stein-adlers came flapping to the shelf on which hung something that seemed to flutter at times like a shred of cloth stirred by the abyss winds.
The lammergeier, huge and horrible with scarlet eyes ablaze, came out on the shelf of rock and yelped at the great rock-eagles; but, if something indeed lay dead there, possibly it was enough for all--or perhaps the vulture-like bird was too heavily gorged to offer battle. McKay saw the rock-eagles alight heavily on the shelf, then, squealing defiance, hulk forward, undeterred by the hobgoblin tumult of the lammergeier.
McKay leaned over the gulf as far as he dared. He could get down to the shelf; he was now convinced of that. Only fear of being seen by the soldiers on Mount Terrible had hitherto prevented him.
Rope and steel-shod stick aided him. Sapling and shrub stood loyally as his allies. The rock-eagles heard him coming and launched themselves overboard into the depthless sea of air; the lammergeier, a huge, foul mass of distended feathers, glared at him out of blazing scarlet eyes; and all around was his vomit and casting in a mass of bloody human bones and shreds of clothing.
And it was in that nauseating place of peril, confronting the grisly thing that might have hurled him outward into space with one wing-blow had it not been clogged with human flesh and incapable, that McKay reached for the remnants of the dead Hun's clothing and, facing the feathered horror, searched for evidence and information.
Never had he been so afraid; never had he so loathed a living creature as this unclean and spectral thing that sat gibbering and voiding filth at him--the ghastly symbol of the Hunnish empire itself befouling the clean-picked bones of the planet it was dismembering.
He had his pistol but dared not fire, not knowing what ears across the gorge might hear the shot, not knowing either whether the death-agonies of the enormous thing might hurl him a thousand feet to annihilation.
So he took what he found in the rags of clothing and climbed back as slowly and stealthily as he had come.
And found Miss Erith cross-legged on the dead leaves braiding her yellow hair in the first sun-rays.