In Secret Part 53

She laid the rifle level across a low branch, drew the stock snug and laid her cheek to it and her steady finger on the trigger.

"When I say'squeeze,' let him have it! Do you understand, Eve?"

"Perfectly."

Then, with one pistol poised for a drop shot, McKay stepped forward and jerked open the man's pack. And the man neither stirred nor spoke. For a few minutes McKay remained busy with the pack, turning out packets of concentrated rations of American manufacture, bits of personal apparel, a meagre company outfit, spare ammunition--the dozen-odd essentials to be always found in an American hunter's pack.

Then McKay spoke again:

"Eve, keep him covered. Shoot when I say shoot."

"Right," she replied calmly. And to the rec.u.mbent and unstirring figure McKay gave a brief order:

"Get up! Hands up!"

The man rose as though made of steel springs and lifted both hands.

Water still ran from his chin and lips and sweating cheeks. But McKay, resting the muzzle of his pistol against the man's abdomen, looked into a face that twitched with laughter.

"You think it's funny?" he snarled, but the blessed relief that surged through him made his voice a trifle unsteady.

"Yes," said the man, "it hits me that way."

"Something else may hit you," growled McKay, ready to embrace him with sheer joy.

"Not unless you're a Boche," retorted the man coolly. "But I guess you're Kay McKay--"

"Don't get so d.a.m.ned familiar with names!"

"That's right, too. I'll just call you Seventy-Six, and this young lady Seventy-Seven.... And I'm Two Hundred and Thirty."

"What else?"

"My name?"

"Certainly."

"It isn't expected--"

"It is in this case," snapped McKay, wondering at himself for such ultra precaution.

"Oh, if you insist then, I'm Gray.... Alec Gray of the States United Army Intelligence Serv--"

"All right.... Gad!... It's all right, Gray!"

He took the man's lifted right hand, jerked it down and crushed it in a convulsive grasp: "It's good to see you.... We're in a hole--deadlocked--no way out but back!" he laughed nervously. "Have you any dope for us?"

Gray's blue eyes travelled smilingly toward Evelyn and rested on the muzzle of the Winchester. And McKay laughed almost tremulously:

"All clear, Yellow-hair! This IS Gray--G.o.d be thanked!"

The girl, pale and quiet and smiling, lowered the rifle and came forward offering her hand.

"It's pleasant to see YOU," she said quite steadily. "We were afraid of a Boche trick."

"So I notice," said Gray, intensely amused.

Then the weather-tanned faces of all three sobered.

"This is no place to talk things over," said Gray shortly.

"Do you know a better place?"

"Yes. If you'll follow me."

He went to his pack, put it swiftly in order, hoisted it, resumed the tump-line, and looked around at Evelyn for his rifle.

But she had already slung it across her own shoulders and she pointed at his wounded hand and its blood-black bandage and motioned him forward.

The sun hung on the shoulder of a snow-capped alp when at last these three had had their brief understanding concerning one another's ident.i.ty, credentials, and future policy.

Gray's lair, in a bushy hollow between two immense jutting cakes of granite, lay on the very brink of the chasm. And there they sat, cross-legged in the warmth of the declining sun in gravest conference concerning the future.

"Recklow insisted that I come," repeated Gray. "I was in the 208th Pioneers--in a sawmilll near La Roche Rouge--Vosges--when I got my orders."

"And Recklow thinks we're caught and killed?"

"So does everybody in the Intelligence. The Mulhausen paper had it that the Swiss caught you violating the frontier, which meant to Recklow that the Boche had done you in."

"I see," nodded McKay.

"So he picked me."

"And you say you guided in Maine?"

"Yes, when I was younger. After I was on my own I kept store at South Carry, Maine, and ran the guides there."

"I noticed all the ear-marks," nodded McKay.

Gray smiled: "I guess they're there all right if a man knows 'em when he sees 'em."

"Were you badly shot up?"

"Not so bad. They shoot a pea-rifle, single shot all over silver and swallowtail stock--"

"I know," smiled McKay.

"Well, you know them. It drills nasty with a soft bullet, cleaner with a chilled one. My left hand's a wreck but I sha'n't lose it."