McKay extinguished his torch and pocketed it.

“The sun will lead us back, Yellow-hair,” he whispered.  “Now hold very tightly to my hand, for it’s a slippery and narrow way we tread together.”

The rocks were glassy.  But there were bushes and mosses; and presently wild grass and soil on the other side.

All around them, now, the tall pines loomed, faintly harmonious in the rising morning breeze which, in fair weather, always blows down from the upper peaks into the valleys.  Into the shadows they passed together a little way; then halted.  The girl rested one shoulder against a great pine, leaning there and facing him where he also rested, listening.

There reigned in the woods that intense stillness which precedes dawn—­an almost painful tension resembling apprehension.  Always the first faint bird-note breaks it; then silence ends like a deep sigh exhaling and death seems very far away.

Now above them the stars had grown very dim; and presently some faded out.

And after a little while a small mountain bird twittered sleepily.  Then unseen by them, the east glimmered like a sheet of tarnished silver.  And out over the dark world of mountains, high above the solitude, rang the uncanny cry of an auerhahn.

Again the big, unseen bird saluted the coming day.  McKay stole forward drawing his pistol and the girl followed.

The weird outcry of the auerhahn guided them, sounding from somewhere above among the black crests of the pines, nearer at hand, now, clearer, closer, more weird, until McKay halted peering upward, his pistol poised.

As yet the crests of the pines were merely soft blots above.  Yet as they stood straining their eyes upward, striving to discover the location of the great bird by its clamour, vaguely the branches began to take shape against the greying sky.

Clearer, more distinct they grew until feathery masses of pine-needles stood clustered against the sky like the wondrous rendering in a Japanese print.  And all the while, at intervals, the auerhahn’s ghostly shrieking made a sinister tumult in the woods.

Suddenly they saw him.  Miss Erith touched McKay and pointed cautiously.  There, on a partly naked tree-top, was a huge, crouching mass—­an enormous bird, pumping its head at every uttered cry and spreading a big fan-like tail and beating the air with stiff-curved drooping wings.

McKay whispered:  “I’ll try to shoot straight because you’re hungry, Yellow-hair”; and all the while his pistol-arm slanted higher and higner.  For a second, it remained motionless; then a red streak split the darkness and the pistol-shot crashed in her ears.

There came another sound, too—­a thunderous flapping and thrashing in the tree-top, the furious battering, falling tumult of broken branches and blindly beating wings, drumming convulsively in descent.  Then came a thud; a feathery tattoo on the ground; silence in the woods.