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"Now let's work along this ridge, down to the point where Dad went. Wasn't he funny?" "He's shore full of ginger. Wal, I reckon he's perked up since you come." Brush and cactus, jumbles of sharp rocks, thickets of scrub oak and dumps of dwarf cedars, all matted along the narrow hog-back, as Blinky called it, made progress slow and tedious. No cowboy ever climbed and walked so well as he rode.
But it was not until half an hour later, when we breasted the crest of the great hog-back that stretched before us like a rampart, that we ourselves met the wind. It came out of the west, athwart the sun's rays, a steady rush of warm air; and with it came the tang of the sea and hint of honey and new-mown hay that somehow clings to Devon moorland through all the changing seasons.
The trail now turned down over a broad, cleared hog-back, at the flattened end of which we could see two shacks and a temporary shed for our mounts. Smoke was rising cheerfully in the air and people were moving about. This was Campote. School at Campote. Our white pony, and the offer made for his tail. It was too dark by this time to see or do much.
But it did not land there; the marksman had not calculated on those erratic gales from the chasm; and the dead pigeon went whirling down into the viewless gulf amid flying vapours mounting from unseen depths. Miss Erith and McKay lay very still. The Hunnish marksman across the hog-back remained erect for a few moments like a man at the traps awaiting another bird.
There were six rifles there in a rack, six wooden bunks, and clothing on pegs not military uniforms but the garments of Swiss mountaineers. Like the three men across the hog-back, and the two whom he had so swiftly slain, the Hun cable-patrol evidently fought shy of the Boche uniform here on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Two of the cable-guard lay smashed to a pulp thousands of feet below.
The girl was still lying flat under the walnut-tree when McKay came back. Without speaking he knelt, levelled his pistol and fired across at the man beyond the hog-back. Instantly her pistol flashed, too; one of the men fell and tried to get up in a blind sort of way, and his comrades caught him by the arms and dragged him back behind the ledge.
"You understand what that means?" "Yes." "Slip off your pack." She disengaged her supple shoulders from the load and he also slipped off his pack and leaned it against a tree. "Now," he said, "you have two pistols and plenty of ammunition. I want you to hold that hog-back. Not a man must cross." However, the three men betrayed no inclination to cross.
In a flash it came to McKay what he should try to do what he MUST do for his country, for the life of the young girl, his comrade, for his own life: The watchers at the hog-back must never signal to that airman news of his presence in the Forbidden Forest!
Such was the invigoratingness of Liverpool's flow of speech that, quite without consciousness of effort, the old man arose easily under his load and strode on toward Happy Camp. From Happy Camp to Long Lake, from Long Lake to Deep Lake, and from Deep Lake up over the enormous hog-back and down to Linderman, the man-killing race against winter kept on.
The homing pigeon, released, walked nervously out over the wet leaves on the forest floor, and, at a slight motion from the girl, rose into flight. Then, as it appeared above the trees, there came the cracking report of a shotgun, and they saw the bird collapse in mid-air and sheer downward across the hog-back.
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