"That might be wiser.... One never knows. ... I'm not quite at ease--Suppose I go as far as the Crucifix with you--" "Thanks, no. I know the mountain and the neck of woods around the summit. I shall travel no path to-night." There was a silence: Miss Erith's lovely face was turned tranquilly toward the flank of Mount Terrible. Both men looked sideways at her as though thinking the same thing. Finally Recklow said: "In the event of trouble--you understand--it means merely detention and internment while you are on Swiss territory. But--if you leave it and go north--" He did not say any more. McKay's sombre eyes rested on his in grim comprehension of all that Recklow had left unsaid. Swift and savage as would be the fate of a man caught within German frontiers on any such business as he was now engaged in, the fate of a woman would be unspeakable. If Miss Erith noticed or understood the silence between these two men she gave no sign of comprehension. Soft, lovely lights lay across the mountains; higher rocks were still ruddy in the rays of the declining sun. "Do the Boche planes ever come over?" asked McKay. "They did in 1914. But the Swiss stopped it." "Our planes--do they violate the frontier at all?" "They never have, so far. Tell me, McKay, how about your maps?" "Rather inaccurate--excepting one. I drew that myself from memory, and I believe it is fairly correct." Recklow unfolded a little map, marked a spot on it with his pencil and passed it to McKay. "It's for you," he said. "The sapling ladder lies under the filbert bushes in the gulley where I have marked the boundary. Wait till the patrol passes. Then you have ten minutes. I'll come later and get the ladder if the patrol does not discover it." A cat and her kittens came into the garden and Evelyn Erith seated herself on the grass to play with them, an attention gratefully appreciated by that feline family. The men watched her with sober faces. Perhaps both were susceptible to her beauty, but there was also about this young American girl in all the freshness of her unmarred youth something that touched them deeply under the circumstances. For this clean, wholesome girl was enlisted in a service the dangers of which were peculiarly horrible to her because of the bestial barbarity of the Boche. From the Hun--if ever she fell into their hands--the greatest mercy to be hoped for was a swift death unless she could forestall it with a swifter one from her own pistol carried for that particular purpose.