The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter 6

THE MAN IN THE CHAPEL

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The astonishing thing was that no one else had noticed anything odd; they lay placidly chewing grass-stems on either side of him, and gave no sign. Nobody but himself had caught and identified the air; and in a moment more it was gone, and even the distances were silent.

He debated uneasily whether he ought to call Tossa’s attention to his discovery, but the decision was taken out of his hands. He had no opportunity to speak to her alone before they were called in to their early supper; and midway through the pork and dumplings Dana appeared in the doorway to announce in a flat, noncommittal voice: “Miss Barber, someone is asking for you on the telephone.”

Tossa dropped her fork with a clatter, suddenly jerked back into her private world of pitfalls and problems. Her face was tight and wild for an instant.

“Telephone?” said Toddy incredulously. “What, here? What secret contacts have you got in these parts, Operator 007-and-a-half?” Dominic was beginning to marvel and chafe at the insensitivity of Toddy; he’d known the girl for years, he should have felt some response to her unbearable tension.

“Don’t be an ass,” said Tossa with a sigh, getting to her feet with a creditable pretence of boredom and resignation. “It’ll be my mother, of course.”

No one, fortunately, thought fast enough to observe that they had come to Zbojská Dolina only on the spur of the moment, and their address certainly could not be known to anyone in England, since Tossa’s card home had been posted only yesterday.

“I never thought your fond mama was fond enough to spend a guinea a minute, or whatever it is, talking across Europe to her darling daughter,” said Christine cynically.

“Don’t be silly, Paul will be paying the bill, of course.”

Dana, hovering in the doorway, said clearly and deliberately: “It is a man calling.” She cast one brief glance at Dominic, and hoisted her shoulder in a slight but significant shrug. She was a little tired of secrecy, and not altogether disposed to go on being discreet. Dana was taking no more responsibility for anything or anyone. It was up to him now.

“What did I tell you? Paul getting paternal!” Tossa walked away to take her call, the back view almost convincing, resigned and good-humoured, ready to report faithfully to her demanding family, and extricate herself from any further enquiries. Though of course, she knew, none better, that it was not Chloe Terrell on the line, or Paul Newcombe, either, or anyone else in far-off England, but somebody here in Slovakia, somebody from whom she had been half expecting a message all this time.

She came back a few minutes later, still admirably composed, if a little tense. She sat down with a sigh, and resumed operations hungrily on her pork and dumplings.

“Everything all right?” asked Christine cheerfully.

“Oh, sure, everything’s all right. They’re home, and no troubles. Just felt they ought to check up on the stray lamb.” She wasn’t too loquacious, because she never talked much about her relationship with her mother, and it wouldn’t ring true now. “Paul mostly, of course, they’re always like that. He means well.”

When she was lying with every word and every motion of her body she could still, it seemed, keep the secret from the Mather twins, but she couldn’t keep it from Dominic. A private geiger-counter built into his deepest being started a pulsating pain in response to the rising of the hackles of her conscience, and halved her pain. And she was aware of it, for she flashed one appraising look at him, and then resolutely evaded his eyes.

But repeatedly, he noticed, his senses perhaps sharpened by the pain, she was glancing now at her watch. She had an appointment to keep? Or she was counting the minutes until she could be alone and stop lying? It wasn’t her natural condition, it hurt her badly, she might well look forward to a respite from it.

But no, she had an appointment! She drank her coffee quickly, though it was scalding hot. She had one eye constantly on the time, and was calculating something in her mind, and frowning over it.

“You won’t mind if I run off and write a proper letter home?” she said deprecatingly, pushing her chair back. “It’s the one sure way to keep ’em quiet for the rest of the trip.”

“You could do it down here,” suggested Toddy obtusely, “and nod our way occasionally.”

“What, with television around? You don’t know how much concentration it takes. I’ll be down in an hour or so.”

She made her escape in good order; only the back view, as she left the room, somehow conveyed a sense of brittleness, excitement and tension. But she was right, they had television to divert their minds, compulsive here even before the sun was down, because they were on holiday from all cerebral engagements, because they had been out in the fresh air all day, and because, when it came to the point, the programmes were rather better than at home, and the picture very much better. They wouldn’t begin to miss Tossa for an hour or so, and they wouldn’t miss him, either.

He gave her two minutes start; he was afraid to make it longer. Then he made an easy excuse about bringing down the maps and surveying the route into Levoca, where there was a notable church and some splendid carving by Master Paul. They agreed cheerfully; they would have agreed to anything, provided it made no claim on them to-night.

He walked straight through the bar, across the terrace, and out to the edge of the trees. There he waited, because the light was still on in the girls’ room. If she didn’t come in a few more minutes, he would assume he could relax, and think about fetching the maps. And he would feel crazily happy to be owing her an apology; as though she wronged him by going her own way, and he injured her by feeling injured. The relationship between them was growing more and more complex and painful.

The light in the girls’ room went out.

He counted the seconds, hoping she wouldn’t come, ready to blame himself for all sorts of suspicions to which he had no right. Then he saw Tossa’s slight, unmistakable shape in the doorway, saw her close the door behind her and slip away from the house, heading towards the climbing path.

He stood motionless among the trees, and let her pass. It was still daylight, though the direct rays of the sun had forsaken the valleys, and were fingering hesitantly at the heights. In the bowl among the summits, where the chestnut goats habited with their elusive bandit-herdsman, it would still be broad day; here among the trees it was almost dusk already. She had the evening world to herself; she moved through it like a wraith.

Dominic stole out of his hiding-place and silently followed her.

Among the trees it was easy to keep relatively close to her, and still escape notice; but afterwards, when they came to the heath land and the scattered rocks, through which the track threaded bewilderingly, he had to hang back a little and slip from cover to cover with care. If she looked back at a turn of the path she might easily glimpse him, and he was reluctant to be caught shadowing her, however illogical that might seem. She hadn’t made any concessions, hadn’t invited him into this secret affair of hers, hadn’t asked him for anything. She had given him her commission without her confidence, and only when he asked for it; and his acceptance of it had given him no rights whatsoever, because he had bargained for none. But neither had he made any promises to withdraw, or cede any of his rights to act on his own. Principal and shadow, they maintained each his station. But he felt that there was, in a way, an obligation on him not to obtrude.

The bruised grasses underfoot, rich with dwarf heaths and wild thyme, sent up a heady sweetness in the cooling evening, and the small breeze that came with the change brought back to him the occasional light rustle of Tossa’s shoes on the loose stones. The most difficult bit was going to be the belt of open meadows, before the valley closed in on both sides in broken rock faces and drifts of rubble and scree, mingled with scattered copses and thickets of bushes. How far could she be going? Not up to the highest bowl, surely, where the huts were? At this hour, and without a coat?

She was out of the rock belt now, she set off boldly across the meadows, and he hung back in cover, and let her go. Once she looked round, and stood for a moment with head reared, watching and listening to make sure she was alone. Then, satisfied, she turned and hurried on, breaking into a run.

He dared not step into the open after her until she had vanished at the first turn of the path, where the outcrop rocks closed in upon it and twisted it, like fingers snapping off a thread. But then he set off across the thick, silent turf at a fast run, to make good the distance he had lost. Even if she looked back, now, she could not see him, and with this springy carpet under his feet she would not hear him. He reached the rocks, and began darting after her from bend to bend of the cramped path, until he heard a stone roll away from under her foot, somewhere ahead of him and not far away.

She had left the path; though narrow and winding here, it was almost level and partly grassed, a stone would not roll like that unless she had begun to climb again. By the sound, she had turned to the right from the track. That way there was at least one possible goal; he could see the roof of the little refuge, rose-coloured tiles against the backdrop of ashen scree. It was still in sunlight, a long ray pierced the open lantern tower like a golden lance. They had climbed a considerable distance already, and for a little while, at least, had outdistanced the twilight.

Yes, she was heading for the chapel. Quiet as she was, the small sounds she did make came down to him clearly, and he could trace her progress by them. The pathway up to the shelf had been laid, at one time, with flat stones, but many of them were unsteady now. And here there were thick bushes and even trees, encouraged by the shelter of the little promontory. Stones from the encroaching scree-slope behind had rolled right down among the bushes, and lay raw and pale in the grass. Then, as the track reached the edge of the level shelf, the trees fell back, and Tossa stepped out on to the plane of rock before the chapel door. Rubbish of scree had reached the wall on the inner side, and begun to pile up against the footings.

Tossa never hesitated. She walked quickly across the few yards of open space, towards the door that sagged sideways on its broken hinge. Dominic wormed his way to the edge of the trees, and watched her go. The place seemed private, silent and abandoned, surely safe enough. He found himself a secure spot in cover, and settled down to wait until she should reappear.

Tossa reached the door, laid her hand on the leaning timbers, and slid round them into the chapel. It seemed she might be a few minutes late for her appointment; at any rate, it was three minutes past eight by Dominic’s watch. She vanished. He began, almost unconsciously, to count seconds.

Four seconds, to be exact. Four seconds of silence from the instant when she disappeared round the sagging door into the dark interior. Then the sharp, small crack, that he took first for a dry twig snapping under a foot, and knew next moment for a gun-shot.

He discovered that he knew it when he found himself flat on his face, writhing like an eel out of the bushes and on to the grey, striated face of rock, wriggling frantically towards the door of the chapel. And it seemed that his senses were capable of splitting themselves into action squads, where the need was sharp enough, for he was simultaneously aware of recording the dull sound of a fall, and the faintest of muted cries, while his conscious hearing was busy with the sound of the shot, struggling to sort out its direction, and baffled by a multiplicity of echoes. Here in this confined and complex valley every explosion of sound ricocheted from plane to plane, repeated endlessly along the gorge, out to the open bowl to westward, and the lowland spaces to eastward.

Tossa had walked into the chapel erect and innocent. Dominic crawled, drawing up his feet behind him into the grateful shade of the doorway, and dragging himself up by the great iron latch. He scrambled round the obstruction, and the first thing that hit him was the slanting shaft of sunlight through the empty window-frame on his left hand. It blinded him for a moment, and then, before he regained his sight or took his sheltering arm down from his eyes, he grasped the significance of this late radiance, and dropped to the floor again in a hurry. His outstretched right hand lit upon something warm and rough-textured, a tweed sleeve, the roundness of an arm limp and still within it.

A yard before his face, and on the same level, Tossa’s face hung frozen and blank with shock, lips parted, great eyes stunned into dullness. That was the first thing he saw as his vision cleared again. The second was the young man who lay sprawled between them half on his face, one arm doubled under him, one flung out towards the doorway, with a blue-black hole oozing a sluggish glue of blood just to the right of the base of his skull, in the neatly cropped fair hair, and a small pool gathering underneath his throat, in the dust of the paved floor. A well-dressed young man, in good grey slacks and sportscoat, as English as brown ale. It was hardly necessary to stoop and examine the motionless, astonished face pressed against the dirty flagstones, but Dominic did it, all the same.

The man who ran the MG, the man who had drunk coffee in a corner of the kavarna at Zilina, and exchanged messages with Tossa by means of her comb-case, was never going to report on his mission, whatever it might be. There was no pulse detectable in the wrist on which Dominic pressed his fingers; there was not the faintest misting discernible on the watch-glass he held to the slack lips for want of a mirror.

X with diplomatic plates was unmistakably and irrevocably dead.

Tossa came out of her daze with a violence that almost shattered them both, broke into rending, tearless sobs, and tried to get to her feet, in a horrified recoil from the poor creature on the floor. Dominic dropped the heavy hand he had been holding, and caught her by the shoulders roughly, pulling her down again.

“Don’t get up! Don’t you understand? The window! The light!” He reached across the dead man, and drew her close to him, kneeling upright and holding her tightly in his arms. His back ached with her weight and his own, but that didn’t matter. Neither, for the moment, did the dead man over whom they leaned to each other thankfully and fearfully. “I’m here, I’m with you, I won’t leave you. Keep down, and keep hold of me. You’ll be all right. Tossa, you know me—Dominic. Now, take it easily, and we’ll pull out all right. I came to look after you. I said I’d be around.”

“He’s dead!” whispered Tossa, shivering with shock.

“He is dead, isn’t he? There’s nothing we can do for him?”

“No, there’s nothing we can do. He’s dead.” It disposed, he saw, of the first urgency. He felt her relax in his arms. Now they were two, burdened with the responsibility only for themselves. It was no comfort at all, but it simplified things. It even accelerated understanding.

“I came here to meet him,” she said numbly. “He telephoned me. It wasn’t my mother.”

“I know. Never mind that now. What happened? When you came in here? Tell me what you can.”

“He was standing over there,” she said in a dulled but obedient whisper, “beyond the window, where it’s dark. When I came in, he started across to meet me. He stepped right into the sunlight, and then he suddenly lurched forward, and fell past me. I couldn’t understand what had happened to him, all at once like that.”

“Somebody shot him,” said Dominic. “Somebody’s outside with a rife. I heard the shot. He was covering that window, waiting for his chance, and he got it when this chap stepped into the light. So keep down here in the shadow, whatever you do.”

“He may have seen us come,” she said, shuddering in his arms, “you or me or both. Especially me—I didn’t hide. Suppose he thinks Mr. Welland may have told me something before he was killed? He came to tell me something!”

“Somebody out there was damned determined he shouldn’t get the chance. Did he manage to say anything to you? Anything at all?”

“When I came in he started to say: ‘Miss Barber, there you are.’ Something like that. And then he pitched forward and fell down.”

“And afterwards? When you were kneeling by him?”

“He did try to say something. It sounded like: ‘But he couldn’t have known—nobody else knew!’ And then he said: ‘Impossible!’ quite clearly, sort of angrily. Just: ‘Impossible!’ And then there wasn’t anything else. And now he’s dead!”

“And on the telephone? He didn’t tell you anything then?”

“He only said he must see me, and would I meet him here. It’s my fault. If it hadn’t been for me, if I hadn’t interfered, he’d still have been alive. I never wanted to break things, but I do. I break everything!”

She was shaken by a momentary gust of weeping, but she pushed the weakness away from her indignantly, and clung to Dominic’s sweater with convulsive fingers, as to the anchor of her sanity.

“If the man outside—the man with the rifle—if he knows we’re in here, if he knows we’re defenceless, we’re as good as dead, too, aren’t we? Because he can’t afford any witnesses.”

“He may not know. And even if he does, he can’t be all sides of us at once. Listen, Tossa! You stay here, and stay down. You understand? I want to take a look out of the window.”

“You can’t! He’s that side, he must be. He’ll fire again.” She kept her hold of him fiercely, and it was not a hysterical grip, but a very practical and determined one, meant to secure what she valued.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to show myself, I’m not such a fool. I’ve got to see where he could be, and how much ground he can cover.” He detached her hands from his person firmly, and slid away from her along the dusty floor, to draw himself up cautiously on the dark western side of the window.

With his cheek flattened against the wall, he could peer out with one eye over the range of country which must contain, somewhere, the man with the rifle trained on this spot. He found himself looking out, as he might have realised before if his mind had been working normally, over the full width of the valley, for below him the ground fell away to the path and the brook. Only a long segment of the opposite wall of the valley was presented to view. That was comforting, for it meant the marksman must be some considerable distance away, too far to change his ground quickly.

His field of fire was more or less determined. Dominic recollected the way the bullet had entered, slightly to right of centre near the base of the skull. That seemed to indicate that the rifleman was somewhat up-valley from their position, undoubtedly somewhere in cover on the far side, and approximately on a level with the chapel.

Right opposite the window where he stood, and on a level perhaps a few yards higher, was the scarred face of rock where Herbert Terrell had fallen to his death. There were plenty of bushes at the up-valley side of that cliff-face. The position was approximately right. Murder, it seemed, clung very close to this spot.

What could the distance be? Nearly half a mile, surely. Did that mean telescopic sights? If he couldn’t sight them from where he was, he certainly couldn’t change his position and shorten the range very quickly. And if he was covering this window from over there, he couldn’t even see the doorway, it was round a good, solid corner of masonry. So with a lot of luck he might not have seen them at all. In that case he could only feel uneasily certain that the young man who knew too much must have come here to meet someone, and he might, just might, know enough to feel sure who that someone was likely to be. But he couldn’t know, at this moment, and he couldn’t break cover and show himself, in case someone escaped to tell the tale. Secrecy was of the essence. When he killed it had to be anonymously, unless he could be absolutely sure of killing everyone who might be able to connect him with the affair.

There was cover for most of the way back to the Riavka hut; only the thirty yards of open rock here outside the door, and the expanse of meadows well below, presented real hazards. And the first was surely the worst, just the getting out of this stone box, and into the bushes. It was all very well calculating hopefully that the enemy must be in a position from which he ought not to be able to see the doorway, but even so he might be able to see the last few yards of that rock shelf before the path dropped from it into the trees. And it appeared that he was an excellent shot, too good by half. Could he command a view of the lower meadows from his perch? And would a target crossing them be still within his range?

If they waited a little while the abrupt dusk would fall, and make it easier to move unseen; but easier for their enemy as well as for them. And in that same little while he could be down in the valley, if he knew enough to be sure who they were and where they must make for, and slicing diagonally across rough ground to get to the meadows before them and cut them off there.

Dominic licked sweat from his lip, and hung irresolute for a moment. The slanting shaft of sunlight, narrower and narrower every moment, had begun to tilt steadily now. The globule of brightness where it struck the far side of the window-frame was climbing upwards, accelerating all the time. He understood; the sun had reached the point of dropping behind the crests, and when the last sliver of orange-red vanished it would suddenly be half-dark. If there was going to be one moment when it would be safe to run across the shelf of rock and into the trees, that would be the moment. The valley dusk fell like a stone; even eyes braced and trained to watch steadily must be blind for a second or two.

He looked down at Tossa, coiled in the dust of the floor and watching him unwaveringly. She had on a heather tweed skirt that could vanish against almost any indeterminate background, but her sweater was cream-coloured. Dominic peeled off his dark-red pullover, and tossed it across to her.

“Put this on. And for God’s sake do just what I tell you, and don’t give me an argument. We’ve got to get out of here intact, that’s all that matters.”

She looked at the dead man, and said faintly: “We can’t leave him here like this.”

“Don’t be an idiot! We can’t take him with us, and if we get knocked off ourselves we can’t even report his death. Do as I tell you. Put that pullover on, and get over to the door. Stay inside until I give you the word, and then run for the trees. And I mean run! And keep running. Stay in cover. When you come to the open bit, I hope it’ll be dark enough to cover you, but run like a hare, anyway. Don’t stop till you get home. I’ll be following you.”

The globule of gold, redder and angrier now, was halfway up the window-frame, and gliding upwards always a shade more rapidly. Tossa scrambled into the dark pullover, and slid like a cat along the flagstones, but towards him, not away from him. Before he knew what she was about she was on her feet close to him, trembling against his shoulder.

He turned on her furiously. “Get the hell over to the door, I told you!…”

He broke off there, confounded. In the half-darkness her soiled, strained face was only inches from his own, and not fixed in ill-judged obstinacy, as he had expected, but utterly grave and calm. It was as if he had never seen her eyes fully alive and conscious before, because what she was looking at now was the intimate prospect of death.

“Yes, I’m going,” she said placatingly, and leaned forward suddenly the last few inches, stretching on tip-toe. Her mouth touched his hesitantly, fixed and clung for a staggering instant. “Just in case!” she said in a rushing whisper, and she was gone, stooping and darting under the wasting finger of light, and crouching alert and still just within the doorway.

The circle of gold reached the top of the window-frame, and collapsing together like a punctured balloon, vanished. The glow went out, the dusk came down like a lid.

“Now!” urged Dominic hoarsely. “Run!”

She was off like a launched arrow. He heard the light, rapid flurry of her footsteps racing across the smooth rock, heard them recede, vibrating away into silence. He held his breath until the blood thundered in his ears, waiting for the shot, but it didn’t come. She was away safely, she hadn’t been seen.

His knees shook under him with relief and reaction. He clung to the edge of the window and leaned his forehead against the chilly, flaking whitewash of the wall for a moment. Now give her time, don’t follow her too soon, in case he makes some move to case the chapel more closely. Because he must be wondering desperately how successful he’s been, whether this poor devil’s mouth is securely closed, and whether it was closed in time. There must be no more disturbances, here round the chapel, until Tossa’s clear away and safely out of it.

He laid the back of his hand against his lips, carefully and wonderingly, pressing the lingering warmth and stupefaction of her kiss more intimately into his flesh. It would be a mean thing, as well as a stupid one, to attach too much significance to it. She’d kissed Mirek when he left them. Dominic was beginning to understand that action of hers very well now; it was an act of atonement for the distrust she had felt of Mirek’s disinterested kindness. And she’d kissed him now out of gratitude just for his being there, and as a symbol of human solidarity, in the face of the threat to their lives. And that was all. An impulse, like the other one, because she was not very articulate, even if there’d been time for words.

Five minutes, at least, before he ought to move to follow her, and nothing now he could do, except watch that darkening expanse of mountain-side across the valley, and listen with strained ears for any sound. She would be among the rocks now, near the edge of the meadows. Thank God she could run like a deer. And the man with the gun was half a mile away, even as the crow flies, and nearer a mile on the ground. Out of his sight was out of his reach.

But what had she meant by: “Just in case!”? The words penetrated to his brain only now, and shook him with a new astonishment, and a new and illuminating recollection of her face, half out of focus because of its nearness, reaching up to his. He had never seen her utterly relaxed and at rest until that moment; as though she had only just seen clearly what it was all about, and what was of value in it, and what of no value, and dropped all the non-essentials, like worrying about her own conscience, to concentrate on what really mattered. And kissed you, he said to himself sardonically. My boy, you fancy yourself!

Detail was lost now in a dimness which was not yet dark—the afterglow was something for which he hadn’t, in fact, made sufficient allowance—but which did confuse vision over any distance. The five minutes were up, surely he could risk leaving now. If he attracted notice, at least she was clear of it, there was one safely away to raise the alarm. And since Tossa had crossed the open space without producing any reaction, the odds were that his original calculations had been accurate, and that whole shelf of rock before the doorway was out of the murderer’s range. No harm, though, in making a run for it.

He stepped wincingly round the body stretched on the dusty floor, and for a moment the thought of leaving him here alone was almost unbearable. Death is lonely enough in any case. He had never seen it quite so close before, and never so crudely, only in its tamed and mitigated state, ringed with rites and sympathisers. Dominic stood shivering for a moment in his thin sweater-shirt, irresolute over the dead man, and then turned his head aside with determination, and made for the door. The only thing he could do for this poor wretch was not to be done here. He slid round the leaning door, stepped out gingerly on to the rock, and ran.

Half-way across the open space a stone rolled under his foot, and brought him down in a heavy fall, knocking the breath out of him. The noise seemed enormous, and set echoes rolling from side to side of the valley. He lay half-dazed, but already groping forward with his hands to thrust himself to his feet again; and suddenly a second sharp, dry crack sent sharper echoes hiccuping down the rocks, and something hit the ground close beside his right ear with a horrid leaden plunk and a sharp, protesting whine.

Every nerve in him curled willingly in upon itself, struggling to make him smaller and less vulnerable. Every particle of energy he had left in him gathered him to his feet in a wild leap, and hurled him forward towards the shelter of the trees. He knew very little about guns, but he knew the whimper of a bullet ricocheting. Not an inch of this shelf was out of the marksman’s range now, and a racket like that fall, to a true ear, made almost as fair a target as a proper sighting. He had changed his position, but he was still up there on the hillside, he’d merely worked his way down-valley on the same level, to cover the doorway. By the only route, then—by the traverse path across the cliff, from which Terrell had fallen to his death.

Dominic reached the edge of the trees and half-fell into their shelter; and something flew out of the green shade to meet him, and folded thin, straining arms about him with a sob of thankfulness and desperation. The shock fetched a gasp out of him. He clasped the embracing fury tightly, and hissed at her in confused rage:

“What the hell are you doing here? I told you to keep going!”

“Without you?” Tossa spat back at him indignantly. “What do you take me for?”

“Well, come on now, damn you! Get out of here, quick!”

“My God, I like that! I’ve only been waiting for you!”

“Shut up, just run!”

He caught her by the wrist, and dragged her at a frenzied, slithering run down the steep path. Speed was better than silence, now that they were in cover. Whatever noise they made they could out-distance, and the man with the gun, whatever his powers as a shot, had just demonstrated that he was still up there on the opposite mountainside, and could not possibly out-run them on their way down to the hut. Behind them they heard the sound of stones rolling, the faint slither of scree. Perhaps the spent bullet had started a minor slide. They didn’t stop to investigate. Hand in hand they ran, untidily, blindly, bruising themselves against rocks, slipping on the glossy grass, until they reached the main path, and settled down to a steady, careful run.

Across the meadows they could race silently, the thick turf swallowing their footsteps; and beyond, through the broken heathland, they relaxed their speed a little, feeling themselves almost safe, almost home.

“Dominic—he didn’t hit you? You’re sure?”

“No, I’m all right, he didn’t hit me. But, Tossa…”

“Yes?”

“We can’t keep quiet now. This is murder. You’ll have to tell everything you know.”

“I can’t! You don’t understand.”

“You’ll have to tell how this happened. If you don’t I shall. And it was to him you promised not to tell anything—wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said faintly. They were in the darkness of the forest now, above the brook, and they had to go gently, partly because they found themselves suddenly very tired and unsteady, partly because the path was narrow and the night deeper here. He folded his arm about her, and they moved together, warmly supporting each other.

“He’s dead, Tossa. It’s for him you have to tell the truth, now. That releases you.”

“No,” she said, shivering. “You don’t understand. I’ll tell you, but I can’t tell people here. I can’t! You’ll see that I can’t.”

“Never mind, don’t worry now. Let’s get home and find the twins. We’ll talk it over, we’ll see how best to handle it.”

Touching each other in the darkness, holding fast to each other where the path was tricky, confounded them almost more than their momentary head-on encounter with death. They were close to the deep green basin where the hut lay; the lighted windows shone upon them through the trees. Hand in hand they stumbled across the open grass towards the door of the bar.