Suddenly, a little ahead on his right, he saw the flicker of a boy's white blouse amid the undergrowth. With a muttered execration he slanted towards it, but was checked by a slight rustle on his left. Swinging round, he caught a glimpse of a small figure flitting among the trees. He stopped. His limbs were shaking; streams of perspiration trickled down his face. Now at last he knew the meaning of these stealthy movements, this sinister silence. The boys had been set to dog him. The certainty appeared to paralyse him. He stood swaying on his feet, glancing around for a means of escape from the toils that he felt closing about him. Mechanically he raised his hand and dashed from his face the rolling beads.
The spell was broken by the sound of a motor cycle and shouts behind. As though galvanised, he made a sudden break at full speed ahead, in a line between the two boys he had last seen. Looking neither to right nor to left he pounded on until he was breathless. Then he paused to listen. Had he shaken off the trackers? The whirr had ceased, the shouts were fainter; he was beginning to think that he had gained a few minutes when a small figure scurried through the undergrowth in front of him. He started again, bearing to the left. A glint of white amid the green intensified his terror. He lost command of himself. No longer did he take the dying sunlight as his guide. Blindly, desperately he struggled on, every moment changing his course. The sounds had ceased; there was not even a rustle to warn him.
Presently he stopped, aghast. Before him was the patch of grass which his weight had flattened. He had been moving in a circle. Then a gleam of hope lit the darkness of his despair. He was now near the road; perhaps his pursuers had penetrated far into the wood. He pushed on, staggering, came to a sunken track, and, supporting himself against a tree trunk, looked fearfully around. There, to the left, at the side of the track, were two motor bicycles. The old Frenchman was keeping guard. No one else was in sight. Gathering his strength, he rushed headlong towards his last hope.
The old man heard his footsteps, looked up, and raised his feeble voice in a quavering shout. There was no time for a second. The soldier hurled himself upon the aged peasant, felled him with one blow, sprang to one of the bicycles, started the engine, ran the machine a few yards and leapt into the saddle. With every jolt as the bicycle gained speed on the rough track his heart grew more elate. Whither the track led he neither knew nor cared; his whole soul was in the present.
Right and left of him were the trees. He had ridden perhaps thirty yards when, from the right, a khaki-clad figure dashed into the track just ahead. The fugitive increased his speed and rode straight on. If the man stood in his way, so much the worse for him. Then, in a moment, Atropos cut the thread. As the bicycle was whizzing by, the man flung himself bodily upon it. There was a crash, a thud, then silence.
A few minutes later, Kenneth and Harry came hurrying to the scene.
"Is he killed?" asked the latter, as Kenneth stooped over the body lying on the machine.
"No, he's alive," replied Kenneth, after thrusting his hand into the man's tunic.
He unscrewed the stopper of his flask, and poured weak spirit into the unconscious man's mouth. Not until Ginger had recovered consciousness did they turn their attention to the other man, whose case, indeed, they had recognised at the first glance as hopeless. When he was hurled from the machine, his head had struck a tree trunk on the opposite side of the track. Stoneway was dead.
Yet he had survived his partners. Perhaps half-an-hour before, Obernai and the rest of the gang, after a drumhead court-martial, had paid the last penalty. Spying, at the best, is ignoble work; and when it is accompanied, as in Obernai's case, with the treacherous abuse of hospitality and the betrayal of trusting folk, the spy's doom awakens no sympathy.