"This is no place to talk things over," said Gray shortly.
"Do you know a better place?"
"Yes. If you'll follow me."
He went to his pack, put it swiftly in order, hoisted it, resumed the tump-line, and looked around at Evelyn for his rifle.
But she had already slung it across her own shoulders and she pointed at his wounded hand and its blood-black bandage and motioned him forward.
The sun hung on the shoulder of a snow-capped alp when at last these three had had their brief understanding concerning one another's identity, credentials, and future policy.
Gray's lair, in a bushy hollow between two immense jutting cakes of granite, lay on the very brink of the chasm. And there they sat, cross-legged in the warmth of the declining sun in gravest conference concerning the future.
"Recklow insisted that I come," repeated Gray. "I was in the 208th Pioneers—in a sawmilll near La Roche Rouge—Vosges—when I got my orders."
"And Recklow thinks we're caught and killed?"
"So does everybody in the Intelligence. The Mulhausen paper had it that the Swiss caught you violating the frontier, which meant to Recklow that the Boche had done you in."