V
It must have been somewhere on the northernmost spur of the Maurras range that I lost my way. It was not yet night, exactly, but it was far from broad daylight. The trail seemed to come to an end in a tangled clump of bushes, that looked like all the other underbrush on the solitary heath. Siegfried went courageously in, however, slipping about, but shrewdly feeling the ground with a forefoot before he rested his weight upon it. I relied mostly on his instinct to determine what was path and what was heather. Unfortunately I had forgotten that at the northern tip of the ridge the Tourris trail makes off to the left from the route to the Grand Cap. I should have remembered this, I suppose; for the Tourris trail makes a well-known tramp from Toulon—up to the famous Col de la Mort de Gauthier. Strangely significant name!
My horse turned off on that trail, a fact of which I was not at once aware, because I had not even noticed the fork when we came to it.
If the path hitherto had been bad, it now became positively dangerous. The ground was rough, broken by boulders and ledges and with deep ravines and rain-courses. We had left the rolling knolls about the basin of Valaury and were skirting the first rocky escarpments of the mountains. Siegfried went down on his knees a number of times. Meanwhile long streamers of cloud kept reaching down from the ceiling of mist above us, a ceiling that was closer and closer to our heads as we reached the higher land. Eventually we found ourselves in a sort of transparent, almost luminous, haze, which I knew was the forerunner of the bank of thick fog I had been watching as it drifted along some thirty feet above our heads.
“Provence always was a dirty hole!” I swore, as I well remember.
But at just this moment, the trail, if trail it could be called, took a sharp descent. Now we should have been going up-grade all along, and this sudden drop surprised me. Nothing of the kind had been indicated on my chart. I thought for a moment of consulting the map again, but the annoyance of unfolding the unwieldy paper and of studying in such wretched light all that maze of ditches and indentations deterred me. Besides, the drop soon came to an end and we were going uphill again, across a sort of hollow thickly overgrown with brush. The path was now a thing of the past decidedly. We were in a thicket of cat-briar which scratched Siegfried’s belly and sides and cut my hands as I tried to keep the nettles off my own face. I could not get a good look at the ground, so thick was the undergrowth, but I observed that Siegfried was advancing with greater and greater reluctance. That much was evident. He did not like this going blindly into a territory where he scented danger.
Now there was another sharp drop followed by a third up-grade.
This convinced me that I was certainly off the road. I had been crossing a sort of saddle with three humps in line. No such ground figured on the trail to the Grand Cap. I thought I would keep on, however, to the top of the next rise. From there, perhaps, I could get a look around.
And it turned out as I had hoped.
From the top of the grade ahead, I could see a broad plain shut in on all sides by mountains. These were lost in the distance; but even in that heavy weather their outlines were characteristic enough. This massive barrier to the West could be nothing but the Faron—the “Sleeping Dog” as it is sometimes called from its unusual contour. Over here was the Coudon, just as surely; there was no mistaking its eastern spur, sharp-pointed like the prow of a vessel cutting into the plain. Where was I then? There could be no doubt. I had made the summit of “Walter’s Death” itself! So then, I must hurry back, and make as good time as possible! I must try to find the fork where I had gone astray and take the trail that went out to the right from there. Time was an important matter. I might still have a half hour left before complete nightfall.
Siegfried was loathe to plunge back into the maze of cat-briar from which we had just so painfully emerged. His nose had been scratched in a number of places. I pressed my knees into his sides to intimate that speed was a consideration. Pluckily he went back down the incline, and at the bottom, indeed, he broke into a trot.
And he trotted on—but not for long.
Just before we were reaching the second grade, I suddenly felt my saddle give way beneath me. I fell, and so did Siegfried. I remember the rough scratch of the brambles as I shot through them and the thud with which I struck on a stone. I lay stunned for the fraction of a minute; then I jumped to my feet, bleeding, bruised, torn, but unhurt, all in all. Not so with Siegfried! I knelt beside my poor, poor horse. His left forefoot had caught in a crevice between two stones, and his leg had snapped like a pipe-stem at the ankle. Never again would Siegfried take me on my morning gallop! Never would he leave that fatal gully into which he had gone so much against his will!
I wept.
We men of the cavalry think more of our horses than we do of our friends and of our lovers. I wept! But then, in a sort of reaction to cold brutality, I drew my revolver, pressed the muzzle into Siegfried’s ear, closed my eyes, and fired. The noble body trembled for a brief second; then it lay limp and relaxed under that shroud of bush and cat-briar.
Coldly, mechanically, I returned my pistol to its place. Then I walked away, up toward the top of the second hill, where I sat down on the first stone I came to.
A quarter of an hour must have passed before I came really to myself and thought of considering the plight in which I found myself.
It was not an enviable one! Here I was, on foot, well off any beaten trail, virtually lost in the most lonesome waste of the mountains of Provence. I had passed a deserted hut some four miles back on the road. The battery on the Cap must be fully seven or eight miles further on beyond the fork. And my duty it was to get there regardless of my helplessness in that impenetrable thicket, from which twilight was rapidly fading now, yielding to black night.