After a silence Flint giggled in the choking darkness as the door opened cautiously again, and shot at the terrified orderly.
"I'm a cockney, am I? And you don't think much of the Devon cuckoos, do you? Now I'll show you that I understand all kinds of cuckoos——"
Both flashes split the obscurity at the same moment. Flint fell back against the wall and slid down to the floor. The outer door began to open again cautiously.
But the orderly, half dressed, remained knee-deep in the snow by the doorway.
After a long interval Gary struck a match, then went over and lit the candle. And, as he turned, Flint fired from where he lay on the floor and Gary swung heavily on one heel, took two uncertain steps. Then his pistol fell clattering; he sank to his knees and collapsed face downward on the stones.
Flint, still lying where he had fallen, partly upright, against the wall, began to laugh, and died a few moments later, the wind from the slowly opening door stirring his fair hair and extinguishing the candle.
And at last, through the opened door crept Carfax's orderly; peered into the darkness within, shivering in his unbuttoned tunic, his boots wet with snow.
Dawn already whitened the east; and up out of the ghastly fog edging the German Empire, silhouetted, monstrous, against[pg 31] the daybreak, soared a Lämmergeyer, beating the livid void with enormous, unclean wings.
The orderly heard its scream, shrank, cowering, against the door frame as the huge bird's ferocious red and yellow eyes blazed level with his.
Suddenly, above the clamor of the Lämmergeyer, the shrill bell of the telephone began to ring.