Somehow she managed to strip them of the tissue cylinders, drive them from where they crawled on ceiling, wall and sill into whistling flight. Amid a whirlwind of wings she fought them toward the open window; whizzing, flitting, circling they sped in widening spirals to escape her blows, where she stood half blinded in the vortex of the ghostly maelstrom.
One by one they darted through the open window out into the night; and when the last spectral streak of grey had sped into outer darkness the girl slammed the windowpanes shut and leaned against the sill enervated, exhausted, revolted.
The room was misty with the microscopic dust from the creatures' wings; on her palms and fingers were black stains and stains of livid orange; and across wall and ceiling streaks and smudges of rusty colour.
She was still trembling when she washed the smears from her hands. Her fingers were[pg 289] still unsteady as she smoothed out each tiny sheet of tissue paper and laid it on her night table. Then, seated on the bed's edge beside the lighted candle, she began to read the messages written in ink on these frail, translucent tissue missives.
Every bit of tissue bore a message; the writing was microscopic, the script German, the language Flemish. Slowly, with infinite pains, the little bell-mistress of Sainte Lesse translated to herself each message as she deciphered it.
She was trembling more than ever when she finished. Every trace of colour had fled from her cheeks.
Then, as she sat there, struggling to keep her mind clear of the horror of the thing, striving to understand what was to be done, there came upon her window pane a sudden muffled drumming sound, and her frightened gaze fell upon a Death's Head moth outside, its eyes like coals, its misty wings beating furiously for admittance. And around its body was tied a cylinder of white tissue.
But the girl needed no more evidence. The[pg 290] wretched youth in the room overhead had already sealed his own doom with any one of these tissue cylinders. Better for him if the hemorrhage had slain him. Now a firing squad must do that much for him.
Yet, even still, the girl hesitated, almost incredulous, trying to comprehend the monstrous grotesquerie of the abominable plot.
Intuition pointed to the truth; logic proved it; somewhere in the German trenches a comrade of this spy was awaiting these messages with a caged Death's Head female as the bait—a living loadstone wearing the terrific emblems of death—an unfailing magnet to draw the skull-bearing messengers for miles—had it not been that a nearer magnet deflected them in their flight!