"Most extraordinary thing," he declared. "Our friend Rakoff is in there with two or three Bulgarian officers. The fellows we saw were Greeks—one is an officer, the other is a corporal. The officer is pointing out various spots on a large map. Of course one says 'traitor' at first, but traitors don't go attended by corporals. I can't make it out. However, it's clear that we're still in Bulgaria."
"Oh, do let's get on and leave it behind us," Sylvia pleaded, nervously.
But Michael argued the advisableness of waiting until the Greeks came out and of using them as guides to their own territory.
"But if they're traitors they won't welcome us," she objected.
"Oh, they can't be traitors. It must be some military business that they're transacting."
In the end they decided to wait; after about an hour the Greeks emerged, passing once more the belt of pines where Sylvia and Michael were waiting in concealment. They allowed the visitors to get a long enough lead, and then followed them, hurrying up inclines while they were covered, and lying down on the summits to watch their guides' direction. They had been moving like this for some time and were waiting above the steep bank of a ravine, the stony bed of which the Greeks were crossing, when suddenly the corporal leaped on the back of the officer, who fell in a heap. The corporal rose, looked down at the prostrate form a moment, then knelt beside him and began to perform some laborious operation, which was invisible to the watchers. At last he stood upright, and with outspread fingers flung a malediction at the body, kicking it contemptuously; then, with a gesture of despair to the sky, he collapsed against a boulder and began to weep loudly.
Sylvia had seen enough violence in the last month to accept the murder of one Greek officer as a mere incident on such a night; but somehow she was conscious of a force of passion behind the corporal's action that lifted it far above her recent experience of bloodshed. She paused to see if Michael was going to think the same, unwilling to let her emotion run away with her now in such a way as to deprive them of making use of the deed for their own purpose. Michael lay on the brow of the cliff, gazing in perplexity at the man below, whose form shook with sobs in the gray moonlight and whose victim seemed already nothing more important than one of the stones in the rocky bed of the ravine.
"I'm hanged if I know what to do," Michael whispered at last.
"Personally," Sylvia whispered back, "it's almost worth while to spend the rest of our life in a Bulgarian prison-camp, if we can only find out first the meaning of this murder."
"Yes, I was rather coming to that conclusion," he agreed.