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Suddenly the Boche fired at the other winged thing; the enraged and bewildered bird sheered away in flight and the Hun followed. "That's why he shot," said McKay. "He's got a pilot, now." Eagle and plane swept by almost level with the forest where they stood staining with their shadows the white shoulder of Thusis.
It is so entirely ringed with snow-peaks that there is only one way to approach it for a landing, and that is through the canyon edging Thusis Woods. Now the wire cable blocks this canyon. An approaching airplane therefore hangs aloft and signals to the cable-guards, who lower the cable until it sags sufficiently to free the aerial passage-way between the cliffs.
Then whatever the aviator was waiting for evidently happened, for he shut off his engine; came down in graceful spirals; straightened out; glided through the canyon and reappeared no more to the watchers in the forest of Thusis. "Now," remarked McKay coolly, "we know where we ought to go. Are you ready, Yellow-hair?"
In the flood of 1868 the torrent Illgraben, which had formerly spread its water and its sediment over the surface of a vast cone of dejection, having been forced, by the injudicious confinement of its current to a single channel, to discharge itself more directly into the Rhone, carried down a quantity of gravel, sand, and mud, sufficient to dam that river for a whole hour, and in the same great inundation the flow of the Rhine at Thusis was completely arrested for twenty minutes by a similar discharge from the Nolla.
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.
And, as he stood there, through the front window of the hut he saw an aviator and another man come down from the crest of Thusis to the chasm's edge, jump into the car which swung under the cable, and begin to pull themselves across toward the hut where he was standing. The hut screened his retreat to the wood's edge.
All that day they watched the Swiss soldiers searching Mount Terrible; saw a red fox steal from the lower thickets and bolt between the legs of the beaters who swung their rifle-butts at the streak of ruddy fur; saw little mountain birds scatter into flight, so closely and minutely the soldiers searched; saw even a big auerhahn burst into thunderous flight from the ferns to a pine and from the pine out across the terrific depths of space below the white shoulder of Thusis.
"They're exchanging signals. See how the plane circles like a patient hawk. He's waiting for something. What's he waiting for, I wonder?" For ten minutes the airplane circled leisurely over Thusis.
Standing that same afternoon on the rocks of that grim Calvary, with the weatherbeaten figure of Christ towering on the black cross above them, Recklow and his men gazed out across the tumbled mountains to where the White Shoulder of Thusis gleamed in the sun. Through their glasses they could sweep the glacier to its terminal moraine.
On her ragged knees among the leaves she groped for his coat where he had flung it, for the weather had turned oppressive in the forest of Les Errues-and fumbling, she found his notebook and pencil, and tore out a leaf: "Kay dear, two Prussians in Swiss mountain dress have been signalling across the knees of Thusis that our bodies have not been discovered in the ravine.
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