"Drop her arm." The signaller let go and stood at attention.
"Take her knife and pistol and your flags and go across the stream to the hut."
The signaller saluted, gathered the articles mentioned, and went away in that clumping, rocking gait of the land peasant of Hundom.
"Now," said the officer, "strip off your coat!"
She turned scarlet, but he sprang to his feet and tore her coat from her. She fought off every touch; several times he struck her--once so sharply that the blood gushed from her mouth and nose; but still she fought him; and when he had completed his search of her person, he was furious, streaked with sweat and all smeared with her blood.
"d.a.m.ned cat of a Yankee!" he panted, "stand there where you are or I"ll blow your face off!"
But as he emptied the pockets of her coat she seized it and put it on, sobbing out her wrath and contempt of him and his threats as she covered her nearly naked body with the belted jacket and b.u.t.toned it to her throat.
He glanced at the papers she had carried, at the few poor articles that had fallen from her pockets, tossed them on the ground beside the log and resumed his seat and cigarette.
"Where"s McKay?"
No answer.
"So you tricked us, eh?" he sneered. "You didn"t get your rat-poison at the spring after all. The Yankees are foxes after all!" He laughed his loud, nasal, nickering laugh--"Foxes are foxes but men are men. Do you understand that, you d.a.m.ned vixen?"
"Will you let me kill myself?" she asked in a low but steady voice.
He seemed surprised, then realising why she had asked that mercy, showed all his teeth and smirked at her out of narrow-slitted eyes.
"Where is McKay?" he repeated.
She remained mute.
"Will you tell me where he is to be found?"
"No!"
"Will you tell me if I let you go?"
"No."
"Will you tell me if I give you back your trench-knife?"
The white agony in her face interested and amused him and he waited her reply with curiosity.
"No!" she whispered.
"Will you tell me where McKay is to be found if I promise to shoot you before--"
"No!" she burst out with a strangling sob.
He lighted another cigarette and, for a while, considered her musingly as he sat smoking. After a while he said: "You are rather dirty--all over blood. But you ought to be pretty after you"re washed." Then he laughed.
The girl swayed where she stood, fighting to retain consciousness.
"How did you discover the Via Mala?" he inquired with blunt curiosity.
"You showed it to me!"
"You s.l.u.t!" he said between his teeth. Then, still brutishly curious: "How did you know that spring had been poisoned? By those dead birds and animals, I suppose.... And that"s what I told everybody, too. The wild things are bound to come and drink. But you and your running-mate are foxes. You made us believe you had gone over the cliff. Yes, even I believed it. It was well done--a true Yankee trick. All the same, foxes are only foxes after all. And here you are."
He got up; she shrank back, and he began to laugh at her.
"Foxes are only foxes, my pretty, dirty one!--but men are men, and a Prussian is a super-man. You had forgotten that, hadn"t you, little Yankee?"
He came nearer. She sprang aside and past him and ran for the river; but he caught her at the edge of a black pool that whirled and flung sticky chunks of foam over the bowlders. For a while they fought there in silence, then he said, breathing heavily, "A fox can"t drown. Didn"t you know that, little fool?"
Her strength was ebbing. He forced her back to the glade and stood there holding her, his inflamed face a sneering, leering mask for the hot h.e.l.l that her nearness and resistance had awakened in him.
Suddenly, still holding her, he jerked his head aside and stared behind him. Then he pushed her violently from him, clutched at his holster, and started to run. And a pistol cracked and he pitched forward across the log upon which he had sat, and lay so, dripping dark blood, and fouling the wild-flowers with the flow.
"Kay!" she said in a weak voice.
McKay, his pack strapped to his back, his blood-shot eyes brilliant in his haggard visage, ran forward and bent over the thing. Then he shot him again, behind the ear.
The rage of the river drowned the sound of the shots; the man in the hut across the stream did not come to the door. But McKay caught sight of the shack; his fierce eyes questioned the girl, and she nodded.
He crossed the stream, leaping from bowlder to bowlder, and she saw him run up to the door of the hut, level his weapon, then enter. She could not hear the shots; she waited, half-dead, until he came out again, reloading his pistol.
She struggled desperately to retain her senses--to fight off the deadly faintness that a.s.sailed her. She could scarcely see him as he came swiftly toward her--she put out her arms blindly, felt his fierce clasp envelop her, pa.s.sed so into blessed unconsciousness.
A drop or two of almost scalding broth aroused her. He held her in his arms and fed her--not much--and then let her stretch out on the sun-hot moss again.
Before sunset he awakened her again, and he fed her--more this time.
Afterward she lay on the moss with her golden-brown eyes partly open. And he had constructed a sponge of clean, velvety moss, and with this he washed her swollen mouth and bruised cheek, and her eyes and throat and hands and feet.
After the sun went down she slept again: and he stretched out beside her, one arm under her head and about her neck.
Moonlight pierced the foliage, silvering everything and inlaying the earth with the delicate tracery of branch and leaf.
Moonlight still silvered her face when she awoke. After a while the shadow slipped from his face, too.
"Kay?" she whispered.
"Yes, Yellow-hair."
And, after a little while she turned her face to his and her lips rested on his.
Lying so, unstirring, she fell asleep once more.