In Secret

"It was a rough scramble. After I had been hiking along for several hours I realised that I was on a shelf high above another valley, and after a long while I came out where I could look down over miles of country. My map indicated that what I beheld must be some part of Alsace. Well, I lay flat on a vast shelf of rock and began to use my field-glasses."

He was silent so long that Miss Erith finally looked up questioningly. McKay's face had become white and stern, and in his fixed gaze there was something dreadful.

"Please," she faltered, "go on."

He looked at her absently; the colour came back to his face; he shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, yes. What was I saying? Yes--about that vast ledge up there under the mountains... I stayed there three days. Partly because I couldn't find any way down. There seemed to be none.

"But I was not bored. Oh, no. Just anxious concerning my situation. Otherwise I had plenty to look at."

She waited, pencil poised.

"Plenty to look at," he repeated absently. "Plenty of Huns to gaze at. Huns? They were like ants below me, there. They swarmed under the mountain ledge as far as I could see--thousands of busy Boches--busy as ants. There were narrow-gauge railways, too, apparently running right into the mountain; and a deep broad cleft, deep as another valley, and all crawling with Huns.

"A tunnel? Nobody alive ever dreamed of such a gigantic tunnel, if it was one!... Well, I was up there three days. It was the first of August--thereabouts--and I'd been afield for weeks. And, of course, I'd heard nothing of war--never dreamed of it.

"If I had, perhaps what those thousands of Huns were doing along the mountain wall might have been plainer to me.

"As it was, I couldn't guess. There was no blasting--none that I could hear. But trains were running and some gigantic enterprise was being accomplished--some enterprise that apparently demanded speed and privacy--for not one civilian was to be seen, not one dwelling. But there were endless mazes of fortifications; and I saw guns being moved everywhere.

"Well, I was becoming hungry up on that fir-clad battlement. I didn't know how to get down into the valley. It began to look as though I'd have to turn back; and that seemed a rather awful prospect.

"Anyway, what happened, eventually, was this: I started east through the forest along that pathless tableland, and on the afternoon of the next day, tired out and almost starved, I stepped across the Swiss boundary line--a wide, rocky, cleared space crossing a mountain flank like a giant's road.