In Secret

Toward dawn they tried to rush the Pulpit. He used a heavy fragment of rock on the first man up, and as his quarry went smashing earthward, a fierce whine burst from the others: "Shot out! All together now!" But his pistol spoke again and they recoiled, growling, disheartened, cursing the false hope that had re-nerved them.

It was his last shot, however. He had a heavy clasp-knife such as salmon-anglers carry. He laid his empty pistols on the rocky ledge. Very patiently he felt for frost-loosened masses of rock, detached them one by one and noiselessly piled them along the ledge.

"It's odd," he thought to himself: "I'm going to be killed and I don't care. If Isla got HER, then I'll see her very soon now, God willing. But if she wins out--why it is going to be longer waiting.... And I've put my mark on the Boche--not as often as I wished--but I've marked some of them for what they've done to me--and to the world--"

A sound caught his ear. He waited, listening. Had it been a fighting chance in Isla Water he'd have taken it. But the man in the boat!--and to have one's throat cut--like a deer! No! He'd kill all he could first; he'd die fighting, not fleeing.

He looked at his wrist-watch. Miss Erith had been gone two hours. That meant that her slender body lay deep, deep in icy Isla.

Now, listening intently, he heard the bracken stirring and something scraping the gorse below. They were coming; they were among the rocks! He straightened up and hurled a great slab of rock down through darkness; heard them scrambling upward still; seized slab after slab and smashed them downward at the flashes as the red flare of their pistols lit up his figure against the sky.

Then, as he hurled the last slab and clutched his short, broad knife, a gasping breath fell on his cheek and a wet and icy little hand thrust a box of clips into his. And there and then The McKay almost died, for it was as if the "Cold Hand of Isla" had touched him. And he stared ahead to see his own wraith.

"Quick!" she panted. "We can hold them, Kay!"

"Yellow-hair! By God! You bet we can!" he cried with a terrible burst of laughter; and ripped the clips from the box and snapped them in with lightning speed.

Then his pistols vomited vermilion, clearing the rock of vermin; and when two fresh clips were snapped in, the man stood on the Pulpit's edge, mad for blood, his fierce young eyes searching the blackness about him.