“I did,” said McKay.  “My mouth watered.”

“He was quite as big as a wild turkey,” sighed the girl.

“They’re devils to get,” said McKay, “and with only a pistol—­well, anyway we’ll try to-night.  Did you mark that bird?”

“Mark him?”

“Yes; mark him down?”

She shook her pretty head.

“Well, I did,” grinned McKay.  “It’s habit with a man who shoots.  Besides, seeing him was like a bit of Scotland—­their auerhahn is kin to the black-cock and capercailzie.  So I marked him to the skirt of Thusis, yonder—­in line with that needle across the gulf and, through it, to that bunch of pinkish-stemmed pines—­there where the brook falls into silver dust above that gorge.  He’ll lie there.  Just before daybreak he’ll mount to the top of one of those pines.  We’ll hear his yelping.  That’s our only chance at him.”

“Could you ever hit him in the dark of dawn, Kay?”

“With a pistol?  And him atop a pine?  No, not under ordinary conditions.  But I’m hungry, dear Yellow-hair, and that is not all:  you are hungry—­” He looked at her so intently that the colour tinted her face and the faint little thrill again possessed her.

Her glance stole involuntarily toward the white butterflies.  One had disappeared.  The two others, drunk with their courtship, clung to a scented blossom.

Gravely Miss Erith lifted her young eyes to the eternal peaks—­to Thusis, icy, immaculate, chastely veiled before the stealthy advent of the night.

Oddly, yet without fear, death seemed to her very near.  And love, also—­both in the air, both abroad and stirring, yet neither now of vital consequence.  Only service meant anything now to this young man so near her—­to herself.  And after that—­after accomplishment—­love?—­death?—­either might come to them then.  And find them ready, perhaps.

The awful, witch-like screaming of the lammergeier saluted the falling darkness where he squatted, a huge huddle of unclean plumage amid the debris of decay and death.

“I don’t believe I could have faced that,” murmured the girl.  “You have more courage than I have, Kay.”

“No!  I was scared stiff.  A bird like that could break a man’s arm with a wing-blow....  That—­that thing he’d been feeding on—­it must have been a Boche of high military rank to carry these papers.”

“You could not find out?”

“There were only the rags of his mufti there and these papers inside them.  Nothing to identify him personally—­not a tag, not a shred of anything.  Unless the geier bolted it—­”

She turned aside in disgust at the thought.

“When do you suppose he happened to fall to his death there, Kay?”

“In the darkness when the Huns scattered after the crucifixion.  Perhaps the horror of it came suddenly upon him—­God knows what happened when he stepped outward into depthless space and went crashing down to hell.”