"Mark him?"
"Yes; mark him down?"
She shook her pretty head.
"Well, I did," grinned McKay. "It's habit with a man who shoots. Besides, seeing him was like a bit of Scotland—their auerhahn is kin to the black-cock and capercailzie. So I marked him to the skirt of Thusis, yonder—in line with that needle across the gulf and, through it, to that bunch of pinkish-stemmed pines—there where the brook falls into silver dust above that gorge. He'll lie there. Just before daybreak he'll mount to the top of one of those pines. We'll hear his yelping. That's our only chance at him."
"Could you ever hit him in the dark of dawn, Kay?"
"With a pistol? And him atop a pine? No, not under ordinary conditions. But I'm hungry, dear Yellow-hair, and that is not all: you are hungry—" He looked at her so intently that the colour tinted her face and the faint little thrill again possessed her.
Her glance stole involuntarily toward the white butterflies. One had disappeared. The two others, drunk with their courtship, clung to a scented blossom.
Gravely Miss Erith lifted her young eyes to the eternal peaks—to Thusis, icy, immaculate, chastely veiled before the stealthy advent of the night.
Oddly, yet without fear, death seemed to her very near. And love, also—both in the air, both abroad and stirring, yet neither now of vital consequence. Only service meant anything now to this young man so near her—to herself. And after that—after accomplishment—love?—death?—either might come to them then. And find them ready, perhaps.
The awful, witch-like screaming of the lammergeier saluted the falling darkness where he squatted, a huge huddle of unclean plumage amid the debris of decay and death.