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.

Tethered by long cords attached to anklets over one leg the three pigeons walked busily around under the trees gorging themselves on last year’s mast.

That afternoon they dared light a fire and made soup from the beef tablets in their packs—­the first warm food they had tasted in a week.

A declining sun painted the crags in raw splendour; valleys were already dusky; a vast stretch of misty glory beyond the world of mountains to the north was Alsace; southward there was no end to the myriad snowy summits, cloud-like, piled along the horizon.  The brief meal ended.

McKay set a pannikin of water to boil and returned to his yellow-haired comrade.  Like some slim Swiss youth—­some boy mountaineer—­and clothed like one, Miss Erith sat at the foot of a tree in the ruddy sunlight studying once more the papers which McKay had discovered that morning among the bloody debris on the shelf of rock.

As he came up he knew he had never seen anything as pretty in his life, but he did not say so.  Any hint of sentiment that might have budded had been left behind when they crossed the Swiss wire beyond Delle.  An enforced intimacy such as theirs tended to sober them both; and if at times it preoccupied them, that was an added reason not only to ignore it but also to conceal any effort it might entail to take amiably but indifferently a situation foreseen, deliberately embraced, yet scarcely entirely discounted.