The Forbidden Forest

There where they lay together side by side among Alpine roses in full bloom--there on the crag's edge, watching the Swiss soldiery below combing the flanks of Mount Terrible for the perpetrators of that hellish murder at the shrine, these two people could see the Via Mala which had been the Via Crucis--the tragic Golgotha for that poor girl Helsa Kampf.

They could almost see the gaunt, black cross itself from which the brutish Boches had kicked the carved and weather-beaten figure of Christ in order to nail to the massive cross the living hands and feet of that half-senseless girl whom they supposed had betrayed them.

The man lying there on the edge of the chasm was Kay McKay; the girl stretched on her stomach beside him was Evelyn Erith.

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. At night the Swiss camp-fires glimmered on the rocks of Mount Terrible while, fireless, McKay and Miss Erith lay in their blankets under heaps of dead leaves on the knees of Thusis, cold as the moon that silvered their forest beds.