"Cripes," panted Macniff, "I can"t make that over them rocks! I gotta take it by the path. Wot"s the matter, Harry? Wot y" lookin"
at?" he added, following Skelton"s fascinated stare. Then: "Well, f"r Christ"s sake!"
The girl, Helsa, was coming toward them through the trees.
"Where have you been?" she demanded. "Have you seen the Americans?
I"ve been waiting here beside the path. They haven"t pa.s.sed. I met one of our agents in the woods--there was a misunderstanding at first--"
She stopped, stepped nearer, peered into Skelton"s shadowy face: "Harry! What"s the matter? Wh-why do you look at me that way--what are you doing! Let go of me--"
But Skelton had seized her by one arm and Macniff had her by the other.
"Are you crazy?" she demanded, struggling between them.
Skelton spoke first, but she scarcely recognised the voice for his: "Who was that man you were talking to down by the Swiss wire?"
"I"ve told you. He"s one of us. His name is Wolkcer--"
"What!"
"Wolkcer! That is his name--"
"Spell it backward!" barked Skelton. "We know what you have done to us! You have sold us to Recklow! That"s what you done!"
"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 hoa.r.s.e unhuman rags of it:
"d.a.m.n you!" he gasped, "you"ll sell me out, will you? I"ll show you!
I"ll fix you, you dirty s.l.u.t--"
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 h.e.l.l are you Germans?" he called out. "Come out of your holes, d.a.m.n 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 G.o.d"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.
To his dull, throbbing ears came now only the heavy trample of boots among the rocks, guttural noises, a wrenching sound, then the clatter of rolling stones.
Macniff, squatting beside him, muttered uneasily, speculating upon what was being done behind him. But with German justice upon a German he had no desire to interfere, and he had no stomach to witness it, either.
"Why don"t they shoot her and be done?" he murmured huskily. And, later: "I can"t make out what they"re doing. Can you, Harry?"
But Skelton neither answered nor stirred. After a while he rose, not looking around, and strode off down the eastern slope, his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. Macniff slouched after him, listening for the end.
They had gone a mile, perhaps, when Skelton"s agonised voice burst its barriers: "I couldn"t--I couldn"t stand it--to hear the shots!"
"I ain"t heard no shots," remarked Macniff.
There had been no shots fired....
And now in the ghastly light of dawn the Germans on Mount Terrible continued methodically the course of German justice.
Two of them, burly, huge-fisted, wrenched the Christ from the weather-beaten Crucifix which they had uprooted from the summit of its ancient cairn of rocks, and pulled out the rusty spike-like nails.
The girl was already half dead when they laid her on the Crucifix and nailed her there. After they had raised the cross and set it on the summit she opened her eyes.
Several of the Germans laughed, and one of them threw pebbles at her until she died.
Just before sunrise they went down to explore the neck of woods, but found n.o.body. The Americans had been gone for a long time. So they went back to the cross where the dead girl hung naked against the sky and wrote on a bit of paper:
"Here hangs an enemy of Germany."
And, the Swiss patrol being nearly due, they scattered, moving off singly, through the forest toward the frontier of the great German Empire.
A little later the east turned gold and the first sunbeam touched the Crucifix on Mount Terrible.
CHAPTER VII
THE FORBIDDEN FOREST