To his dull, throbbing ears came now only the heavy trample of boots among the rocks, guttural noises, a wrenching sound, then the clatter of rolling stones.
Macniff, squatting beside him, muttered uneasily, speculating upon what was being done behind him. But with German justice upon a German he had no desire to interfere, and he had no stomach to witness it, either.
"Why don't they shoot her and be done?" he murmured huskily. And, later: "I can't make out what they're doing. Can you, Harry?"
But Skelton neither answered nor stirred. After a while he rose, not looking around, and strode off down the eastern slope, his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. Macniff slouched after him, listening for the end.
They had gone a mile, perhaps, when Skelton's agonised voice burst its barriers: "I couldn't--I couldn't stand it--to hear the shots!"
"I ain't heard no shots," remarked Macniff.
There had been no shots fired....
And now in the ghastly light of dawn the Germans on Mount Terrible continued methodically the course of German justice.
Two of them, burly, huge-fisted, wrenched the Christ from the weather-beaten Crucifix which they had uprooted from the summit of its ancient cairn of rocks, and pulled out the rusty spike-like nails.
The girl was already half dead when they laid her on the Crucifix and nailed her there. After they had raised the cross and set it on the summit she opened her eyes.
Several of the Germans laughed, and one of them threw pebbles at her until she died.
Just before sunrise they went down to explore the neck of woods, but found nobody. The Americans had been gone for a long time. So they went back to the cross where the dead girl hung naked against the sky and wrote on a bit of paper: "Here hangs an enemy of Germany."
And, the Swiss patrol being nearly due, they scattered, moving off singly, through the forest toward the frontier of the great German Empire.
A little later the east turned gold and the first sunbeam touched the Crucifix on Mount Terrible.