The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter 10

THE MAN IN AMBUSH

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There was a moment of silence, blank and profound, while they stared at each other. Anger left the formidable, self-sufficient face, and something of wonder, interest and speculation came into it, but nothing at all of either understanding or disquiet.

“You know my name, it seems. Should I know yours?”

“It’s Dominic Felse. But no, you won’t know it. I’m English.”

“That I’d already gathered,” said Alda drily. “Only an Englishman, and I should guess a Londoner, would go striding out on treacherous places with quite such aplomb. Do you realise now that you did your best to kill yourself? Or are you completely a fool?”

The becherovka had begun to burn in Dominic’s cheeks. “I’m not from London. I’m a countryman, almost a hill-man. I knew what I was doing.” He was angry with himself the minute he’d said it; it sounded like a child’s pique, though he had intended something quite different and very much more respectable. “I’ve climbed quite a bit,” he said, almost apologetically. “I know the sort of places where one shouldn’t go.”

“Then you are completely a fool! Or else,” he said, narrowing his deep-set eyes intently, “you wanted me very badly. Perhaps you’d better tell me why.”

“You are Karol Alda?” He knew it, but he wanted it said.

“They call me Karol Veselsky here. But yes, I am Karol Alda. Karol Alda or Charles Alder, whichever you prefer. And what do you want with him?”

“I’ve got a friend who’s in trouble, and I want your help. It concerns you. But it’s quite a story.”

“You’d better tell me.”

And Dominic sat with his hands gripped tightly together between his knees, and told him, almost in a breath. He was not afraid of not being understood. And now he was no longer afraid of any kind of evasion.

“There are four of us here together, I daresay you’ve seen us around. One of the girls is Tossa Barber, and her stepfather was a man named Terrell, who was killed here in this valley, about three weeks ago. It isn’t that she was fond of him, or anything, but she felt bound to him, and she wasn’t satisfied about his death, that’s why she got us to come here. She wanted to find out for herself. And what she found out was that you were somewhere here, and he’d picked up your trail and was looking for you. Tossa felt it might have been murder. But the Slovak police had closed the case and lost all interest in it.”

“Perhaps,” said Alda, eyeing him levelly, “because for them there was no mystery about his death.”

“You mean they know how he died?”

“They know exactly how he died.”

“How?” asked Dominic, moistening dry lips. “I mean, how do they know?”

“They know because I told them. I reported his death.”

“You reported it? I thought the Martíneks… They called out the mountain rescue people…” He broke off there, remembering Dana’s account of that night search. The Martíneks had notified the mountain rescue service, and then gone out to hunt for their missing guest, but the police had been first on the scene. Because the police, it seemed, had known exactly where to go. “Would you mind telling me about it? This isn’t curiosity, it’s terribly important.”

“It’s very simple. I was on my way home by the high-level path that crosses the open rock there. Since you came to investigate his death, I take it you’ve looked at the place. I wasn’t thinking of Terrell. I haven’t thought about him for five years at least, I’ve had other things to think about. I had no idea he was within seven hundred miles of me.

“And at the blind point in the path I met him, face to face.” He caught the brief, fearful gleam of Dominic’s eyes, the one returning instant of doubt, and smiled wryly. “No, I didn’t touch him. I had no time for anything beyond recognising him. Because he’d recognised me, and his reactions were the quicker and the deadlier. He shrank back from me. Jumped back would be nearer the truth. And he went over the edge. When I climbed down to him—it takes ten minutes or so from there—he was already dead. Well, my own telephone at home was as near as any other, so I went on there, and called in the police from Pavol. There was never any mystery for them about his death, except perhaps the mystery of what he was doing there at all, in the dusk alone.”

“But do they know,” asked Dominic pointblank, “about the connection there was between you before? Did you tell them he was the man who was put on your case when you left England?”

Alda’s eyebrows rose. “You’re very well-informed, I see. I told them I had known him and worked in the same institute with him. That was necessary, they wanted him identified, of course. But as for the rest… why bother? It seemed to me irrelevant. I could and did tell them exactly how he fell to his death, and they didn’t question my word. I didn’t think our past connection had anything more to say in the matter. The man was dead. I took it for granted, then, that our meeting like that was pure chance.”

“It wasn’t! He was looking for you, trying to find out what you were doing here, what you were working on. He’d found a piece of scrap paper, music paper, with your handwriting on it, and that brought him here to Zbojská Dolina, searching for you. I suppose it would have been another feather in his cap if he’d been able to bring home word of something sensational.”

He had got so far when he saw that Alda was leaning back against the wall in a convulsion of silent laughter. He sat staring, confounded.

“Forgive me! But how baffled he’d have been if he had found out what I’m working on! Do you know what it is? Do you know why my privacy was left largely undisturbed, why things were arranged so that I did not have to come into the limelight with my story? Because of my vitally important work! Because I am at work on an opera about Comenius! How many sinister codes he’d have read into every note! Especially into the evangelical psalms! That was his profession, and his occupational hazard. It seems he died of it.”

Every word rang true. Dominic believed him all the more readily because there was no attempt to convince; belief was taken for granted, as between honest men who recognise each other on sight. But he still did not understand.

“But why did he fall? Even if he was startled, even if the dusk was coming on, why? He was used to mountains, he climbed the big stuff. Why did he jump back like that? Did he expect you to attack him?”

“Possibly, though nothing was farther from my mind. If only he’d known how little ill-will I bore him, how little I thought of him at all! But more probably he suffered a reflex of conscience, a superstitious recoil. Coming face to face quite inescapably, as he did,” said Alda softly, “with a man he had, by his own standards and in his own way, murdered.”

Alda lifted the empty glass from Dominic’s clenched fingers, and went and refilled it at the rough cupboard on the wall. “Here, it won’t hurt you. You still look as if you need it. How much do you know about myself and Terrell and the Marrion Institute? And how did you get to know? Security must be as tight as ever there.”

“Tossa had it from a man named Welland, some sort of secretary at the embassy in Prague, who knew Terrell as a good climber, and didn’t believe his death could be an accident. He began poking into the past, and he… well, he found…”

“He found me. Quite! A Slovak, an enemy, a possible murderer. A defecting physicist-cum-mathematician on highly secret work. A little hackneyed now, perhaps, but to him convincing, I’m sure. Do you need to know the rest of it? How much do you know?”

Dominic told him, and blushed feverishly over the telling. It was like recapitulating the plot of a sausage-machine thriller; in this clear air he marvelled that anyone should be able to view motives and actions in such crude and unlikely ways.

“Yes, I think you do need to know everything. After your recent effort,” he said tolerantly, “I think you’ve earned it. When I went off into Savoy for my leave, to consider whether or not I should resign, I went up alone into the highest routes I could manage, and kept in touch with no one, either at home or locally. I was trying to wear myself out, body and mind, in the hope of a revelation. And just at the end of my time I was cut off in a solitary refuge in Dauphiné by bad weather and a slight injury, and kept there for a fortnight. The place was well stocked, and I was glad of the extension. But when I got down into Briançon at last, with a fortnight’s beard, burned dark brown, and much thinner than when I went up, I found out from the first English paper I bought that the hysteria of the times had turned me into a fugitive and a traitor. The main points of Terrell’s dossier on me were already in print. They hadn’t given me even two weeks’ grace.”

“You mean,” demanded Dominic, the glass shaking in his hand, “you never ran away at all?”

“Never until then, certainly. After that you might say I walked away. The hue and cry was out after me as I sat reading the catalogue of my offences in the middle of it. All I did was to accept the omen. No, I didn’t run, I walked to the nearest exit. It was a work of art, that dossier. No absolute lies, you understand, only double truths. Maybe it was only the work of a suggestible, ambitious mind bent on rising in his profession, and able to convince himself in the process. Maybe it was coldly and deliberately constructed, for the same personal reasons. I gather he got the Security Office on the strength of the job he did on me. He was a junior in the secretariat when I knew him. All I know is, when we ran headlong into each other he sprang back from me, and went over the edge. How do I know what he saw, and what do I care? Why go further into it now?

“I could have come back, of course, but it would have been to a shower of mud, and a hard fight ahead of me to clear my name. The times were against me. But that wasn’t why I walked away. It was disgust I felt, not fear. And something else, too. A sense that a gate had opened before me for a purpose, and I mustn’t hesitate to pass through it. So I simply turned, without haste, and walked away again into the blue.”

Dominic’s teeth chattered faintly against the rim of the glass. “But you must know that you left people in England convinced that you’d changed sides in the cold war. Even your coming back here would be interpreted as backing up that view.”

“Boy, I was born here. The old lady who has the farm just over the col is my grandmother. Her home is my home. I became English at fifteen because my parents became English, at a time when I was a minor, and went along naturally with them. Don’t misunderstand me, I have nothing against being English. I have simply recognised the fact that in spite of the filling in of papers, I am not English. The process is more complex than that. I took my time over the decision, but in the end I came home.”

“But you did bring your gifts with you. To be used here.”

“Gifts are to be used wherever one goes. But what gifts? That attack on me was an oracle and an opportunity. For years I’d worked earnestly in government service, trying to keep my belief in the professed ideals of government, against all the evidence, forcing myself into the mould of a life for which I was never intended. It took that crisis to make me realise I’d been using my energy in the way least suitable for me, and least effective. Every man must use his own tools for the re-shaping of the world. I’ve gone back to mine. Music, tranquillity, human affection, human dignity—they can all be used to state the political truths I believe in. Putting aside, of course, the narrower meaning of ‘political’. I came home and asked them to take me back as what I am first and foremost, a composer. And they accepted me as a Slovak again on my own terms. I chose to take my grandmother’s name, which is Veselsky, simply because I didn’t want to be an international sensation or a bone of contention, in Czechoslovakia or England or anywhere else. I refuse to be used as ammunition against either of my two countries, and I need privacy and peace in which to work. They must have thought them reasonable requests—they’ve been almost too religiously respected.”

“Then you’re giving all your time to music?” asked Dominic doubtfully.

“You think all my time is too much? This pastoral life is only part of the picture. For composition I find it ideal here in the mountains, but there are other aspects of my life, too. I give occasional piano recitals, I do a great deal of conducting. Oh, I assure you all my time is hardly enough.”

“No—I suppose not. But in England,” ventured Dominic hesitantly, “you had other work as well, this work with aircraft design, and all that. And that was important, too. Tossa said Welland told her you could have been Director of the Marrion. Don’t you miss all that? Don’t you ever want to get into it again here?” He had not quite the hardihood to add: “And if you don’t, why did you bring your notebooks with you?”

Alda smiled. “I won’t say it gave me no satisfaction. I may even take it up again some day, if I do it will be in a very different way. Meantime, with only one life to spend, I’m making sure of the first essential first. Nothing is going to elbow out music a second time. But I keep in touch,” he said, meeting Dominic’s absorbed stare with faintly indulgent good-humour. “I have a friend in America who keeps me supplied with technical magazines. If I ever do decide to get back into the field I shan’t be starting under any great handicap. Not that I think it likely,” he admitted tranquilly. “If ever I thought myself indispensable, I’ve been cured of that. At least one of my undeveloped ideas went into commercial production this spring with a French company—and to better effect than if I’d worked it out for the Institute. What they’d have kept it for I daren’t imagine. Prunières have incorporated it in a light helicopter for crop-spraying in tropical countries. No secrets, reasonably cheap production, and a sensible use. They’re welcome to the profit. I’m content. No doubt somebody or other will happen on all the other ideas, too, given a few years. Simultaneous discovery in music is less likely. I’ll stick to music.”

“Then, of course,” conceded Dominic, “I suppose it wouldn’t be liable to occur to you that Terrell might have been prowling round to spy on your work. And you couldn’t guess—how could you?—that there was likely to be another death.”

“Another death?” Alda looked up sharply. “I’ve heard nothing about a death. Surely the police would have contacted me?”

“They haven’t had much time, it only happened last night. And then, the Terrell case would be closed for them, and they only knew the half of it, they wouldn’t connect this with you. And we weren’t as helpful as we might have been, because we didn’t know… we thought that you…”

“That I’d killed Terrell, and might well kill someone else? Yes, I see your point. If you’ve given up that idea now,” he said grimly, “you’d better tell me just what’s happened.”

Dominic told him the story of Welland’s death, and all that had followed it. Alda had risen, and was pacing restlessly and silently across the patterns of sunlight and shadow in the window of the hut, which faced down the valley, away from the doorway and the smooth grey scar of rock.

“So your friend is being held on suspicion? And you came to look for me! As a valuable witness, or as the murderer?”

“How could I know which, then? I hadn’t met you or spoken to you, all we knew was the Terrell version. Didn’t it seem the obvious thing to think at first, that you were picking them off when they got too close? We’d seen you up on the skyline there with the goats, we saw you carried a rifle—”

“A rifle?” Alda whirled on him with a face of blank, disdainful astonishment. “I carry a rifle? I don’t think I’ve ever even had one in my hands. You’re dreaming.”

“But I did see you with it, up on the crests,” protested Dominic, shaken. “A great long stock sticking up over your shoulder, and the barrel…”

He broke off, hopelessly confounded. Alda had flattened his wide shoulders against the shadowy wall of the hut beside the window, and was laughing his heart out.

“I don’t understand.” Dominic was on his feet, his face burning, a little from the conviction that he had somehow made himself foolish, but much more from the becherovka. “In any case I’d really stopped believing it was you doing the shooting, before I came up here looking for you, but I know what I saw…”

“But you don’t! That’s exactly what you don’t know, but I do, now. This… this is what you saw.” He crossed the dim room in three vehement strides to the corner behind the iron stove, cluttered with tools, and draped with the black felt cloak he had worn in the storm, and disentangled from behind its veiling folds a long object, which he brought forward into the light from the window, and held upright for inspection, laughing still.

It was within three inches as tall as Alda himself, and about as thick as a child’s wrist, a tube of pale wood polished by age and handling. To the back of it, at the upper end, was secured by closely plaited hemp cords a narrower pipe about two feet long, a small round mouthpiece jutting from the back of it at the lower end. It had the conscious irregularity of hand-made things, so that there could never be an exact duplicate. It varied somewhat in thickness from end to end, and was a little bowed and twisted; when Alda lifted it and set the mouthpiece to his lips the double pipe, projecting some fifteen inches above his head, curved very slightly over his left shoulder. He held it with his left hand at waist level, and fingered below at the full stretch of his right arm; and round the finger-holes carved and painted mountain boys circled, dancing.

A gust of breathy, rustling notes came cascading out of the pipe, twining and shaking downwards in an improvised flourish, to settle deeply and sonorously into a slow, plaintive tune. It was hardly louder here, but for the reverberations from the walls, than when they had heard it descending from the hills beyond the col, through a couple of miles of mountain air.

“This is my rifle,” said Alda, taking his lips from the mouthpiece and turning the pipe gently in his hands. “We call it the fujara—not very portable, and a little ponderous to play, because of all the over-blowing, but the queen of the pipes, all the same. The nearest thing to a gun I’ve ever possessed, or am ever likely to. Did you never hear it, down in the valley?”

“We heard it, yes.” Dominic stretched out his hand and took the pipe, fascinated. The wood was silken smooth under his fingers. The little bandits, axes brandished above their heads, leaped like deer, legs doubled under them. “But we didn’t know what it looked like, we’d never seen one. How could we guess?” He fitted his fingers to the holes, and held the instrument against him; and it hung lightly enough, for all its bulk. “What did you call it? A fujara? It’s beautifully made.”

“My great-grandfather made it. For a fujara it’s on the small side, most of them run close to two metres.” He laid it back carefully in its corner, cushioned by the folds of the heavy cloak.

“So it was you,” said Dominic. “I wasn’t imagining things, you did play ‘Bushes and Briars’.”

“Very probably. Was that what brought you up here after me?”

“Partly that. A musician who lived somewhere in these hills and knew English songs seemed a fair bet for Karol Alda. And by then I’d begun to think that maybe the whole business wasn’t quite so obvious as it seemed, even before I knew your side of the story. I know now that you hadn’t got anything to fear, or anything to hide, so why should you want to kill Welland? But you see, somebody else has got something to hide, somebody else is afraid. And I don’t think we were wrong about what he’s afraid of. He’s killed once to keep your case from being dug up again and re-examined, and he may kill again for the same reason.”

“Terrell’s death was not murder,” said Alda, considering him thoughtfully.

“No, I accept that. But it started Welland off on the same trail, and Welland’s death was murder. And now that we know where you stand, and there isn’t anything treasonable about co-operating, there’s nothing to prevent Tossa and me from telling the whole truth. Will you come down to Pavol with me, and tell your part of it, too? Between us all, we ought to be able to clear up this case, and get Tossa out of trouble.”

“I’m ready,” said Alda. “We can go whenever you like.”

Dominic was the first to set foot outside the open doorway, on the sunlit stone under the deep overhang.

There was a sharp, small crack. Something sheered into the weathered wall just in front of his face, and flying splinters stung his cheek. He clapped a startled hand to the place, and brought a smear of blood away on his fingers. And in the same instant Alda flung an arm about him and hoisted him bodily back into the hut in one heave, slamming the door to between them and the second bullet, as it thudded into the thick timbers where a split second before Dominic had been standing.

“I brought him here,” said Dominic huskily, coming out of his moment of sickening shock with quickened senses. He wiped at his stinging cheek with the back of his hand, and stared almost disbelievingly at the minute smears of blood that resulted. “I got you to come down out of your clouds to help me, and now look what I’ve done! Led him straight to you.”

“You don’t know that. Does it matter, anyhow?” Alda drew breath cautiously, and looked the boy over in the warm wood-darkness within the closed door. All the lines of his face had sharpened and brightened, in what might have been merely tension, but looked strangely like pleasurable anticipation. He slid past Dominic to the small, single-paned window that let in light on this side of the hut.

“I do know. If he’d known exactly where to find you, he’d have come for you in the first place. It’s you he wants suppressed. But he did know where I was, to a bit. All I’ve done is fetch you out of cover for him.”

“No, you’ve done something much more useful, brought him out of cover. And if he was following you, why didn’t he pick us both off while we were out on the talus?”

Dominic’s mind was groping its way with increasing certainty through shadowy places. “He couldn’t have been following me, not closely. But he knew where I’d gone. I think… I think he was betting on picking me up on the way back, but when I didn’t go back promptly enough he came looking for me. He must have found the van. He’d know I was still up here, somewhere. If he’d arrived while we were exposed out there, we should both have had it. Therefore he didn’t. He didn’t reach these parts until we were inside here. And he didn’t know there was anyone in here until he heard the fujara. What else could it be? That would be worth investigating, wouldn’t it? He was looking for a musician. He only had to wait and see who emerged, to find out if he was wasting his time. Now he knows he wasn’t. He knows we’re both here. He’s seen us.”

“You’re taking it for granted,” said Alda equably, his lean cheek flattened against the wall beside the dusty pane, “that he’s someone who’ll know me on sight.”

“He’ll know you. I’m sure.”

“And that I’m critically dangerous to him. But I swear I know of no reason why I should be.”

“I don’t understand why, either, but I’m sure I’m right. Welland was killed because he was determined to find you, and he looked like succeeding. Tossa and I are marked down because Welland might have told us what he knew. But you’re at the heart of it. There’s something in your past, in your connection with England, that can ruin somebody, and if he can silence you, the urgency’s over. And I brought you and pinned you here for him!”

“Up to now,” said Alda, “we are still alive. If he knows where we are, let’s see if we can find out where he is. He must be on this side, since he has the doorway neatly covered.” He reached a hand out of shelter to rub away the dust from the window-pane. There was no shot. “The sun probably reflects from the glass, it’s directly on it. So much the better. Come here!”

Dominic came, slipping along the wall and pressing intently at his shoulder, to peer out at the pale corduroy hillside curving away from them round the side of the bowl, until it reached the talus. He looked down the broken, scoured, almost grassless fall below to the bottom of the basin, and again up from the talus by the bare, polished funnel to where the level of firm rock conducted the path across it. The whole bowl seemed, at first glance, to be void of cover, but when he considered it in more detail there was scattered and meagre cover everywhere.

“I am supposed,” said Alda serenely in his ear, “to be somewhat of a prodigy at mathematics. Let’s see how precisely I can calculate. I don’t propose to open the door again simply to try and examine the bullet-hole, but I estimate that he was shooting obliquely into the doorway. The angle I should judge to be something like thirty degrees. And he’s certainly on a higher level than we are. The scar makes things easier—at least we can write off the areas where he can’t possibly be.” He was silent for a moment, his eyes roaming the exposed stretch of country intently, his hand on Dominic’s shoulder. “I make him approximately on the level of the rock path up there. Draw a line along from the distant end of it, say twenty yards. Somewhere within ten yards above or below that line, according to my estimate, he should be. You have that area fixed?”

“Yes.” There were low clumps of bushes there, and some irregularities in the folded ground; it looked a possible hide.

“Keep it fixed. Watch for the slightest movement there, when I give you the word. I’ll see if I can draw him.”

It was extraordinary; his voice sounded gay, his step was elastic, there was no doubting his pleasure now. Dominic, faithfully fixing the oblong of ground he had marked down, longed to turn and look at his companion. Maybe it was true that they were all born Janosíks, venturers by instinct, even the artists.

“A hat wouldn’t be convincing,” mused Alda cheerfully, somewhere behind him. “A shirt-sleeve, perhaps. You’re ready?”

“I’m ready,” he said huskily, his eyes already aching with concentration.

The shot made him leap and shrink inside his skin all the more violently because he was waiting for it with so much passion. Alda made a small, echoing sound on the heels of the impact, half hiss, half laugh, drawing in breath through his teeth. And in the low bushes at the very edge of the rock path, that were quivering faintly and constantly in the breeze, there was a sudden tiny convulsion for which the wind was not responsible.

“He’s there! I’ve got him!” He could turn his head now, and he did, in a frenzy of anxiety, reaching a hand for Alda’s arm as he came slipping back to him. “You’re all right? He didn’t touch you?”

“I’m all right.” He was laughing to himself, a small, inward rhythm like a cat purring. “Where was he?”

“Right at the edge of the scar, a yard or so above the path. It’s all still there now, but I’m sure. I saw him move. Only he may not stay there,” he said, his heart contracting ominously. “If we don’t return his fire soon, he’ll know we’re unarmed. If once he gets the idea, he can come down at leisure and get us. We’d have to cross open ground every way if we ran for it.” He had got his companion into this, and he must get him out. “Even if we could kid him we had a gun here,” he said, “we might keep him frozen where he is.”

And suddenly it occurred to him that they were not totally defenceless. One man with a gun here on the door side of the hut, and the enemy would have to keep cover, and fix his attention upon that danger. There was the window at the back, and a sporting chance of reaching cover from it, and escaping into the valley. That fellow up there couldn’t look everywhere at once.

He turned his head again and looked at Alda, who was scanning the rifleman’s hide with narrowed, eager eyes.

“Would you mind terribly if I borrowed your fujara?”

Alda started, shortened his ardent stare, and looked with amusement and delight at his ally. He was very quick on the uptake.

“You won’t take in a Slovak that way,” he warned indulgently.

“No, I know that,” acknowledged Dominic, gazing back at him with eyes wide and steady. “But I haven’t got to—have I?”

They understood each other perfectly. In some incomprehensible way they had borrowed from each other, and even words had become almost superfluous, so companionably did their minds confer.

“You know the lie of the land here better than I do. You speak the language, I don’t. And you’re the more essential witness now. I don’t understand why, either, but you are. Let me hold his fire here, and you get out by the window and run for help. I’m awfully sorry,” said Dominic, picking his words as fastidiously as a drunk in his anxiety, “to be cornering the safe job for myself, but it’s quicker and easier this way. If you’ll let me try to use the fujara for camouflage, I shall be safe enough. He won’t dare rush me, if he thinks I have a gun.”

It was perhaps the most important speech of his life, up to that moment, and he had to get it right. He licked sweat from his lips. All that mattered now was Tossa, safe for a little while in Ondrejov’s care, and safe for ever, even from baseless regrets for that bird-of-prey, her stepfather, once Karol Alda reached Liptovsky Pavol.

There was a brief and pregnant silence; then Alda said, with a soft ripple of contented laughter: “A good idea! All right, I’ll go. Take the fujara.”

Dominic didn’t at first recognise the chill that budded so curiously in his heart. It wasn’t fear; he was too excited to be afraid. Fear comes more leisurely and deliberately, and grips the corner of your consciousness that isn’t keyed up to resist it. It was a full minute before he recognised it as disappointment. He had what he’d wanted, but somehow he hadn’t expected to get it so easily, without question. He took the fujara in his hands, the smooth, pale, polished, painted wonder that had to do duty for a gun.

“Say when you’re ready, and I’ll try to cover you.”

He heard the harsh sound of a rusty hasp yielding, the creak of the window-frame.

“When you like. I’m ready.”

“Good! Now!”

Dominic opened the door violently, took one rapid step out upon the stone, and on the instant recoiled, stiffening against the jamb. The shot smacked with unnerving aplomb into the opposite door-post; he stared at the hole in dreadful fascination. At least he knew the angle now. If the marksman had been at the opposite end of the rock crossing, Dominic Felse would have been as good as dead.

Vaguely, at the back of his mind, he heard the soft thud of Alda’s feet on the ground outside the window, and their light, fleet running. This was the most desperate of all the moments left to him. He might have a long siege to withstand, but Karol Alda must get away safely. Dominic skinned off his red sweater, and swung it before him across the threshold.

Five! Another hole in the timbers of the wall, terrifyingly close, and two holes through his sweater at the shoulder. He leaned against the jamb of the door, and his knees felt like jelly. How many shots could there be in the magazine? And all he was armed with was a fujara; a beautiful, strange, mysterious musical instrument, the antithesis of every known instrument for killing, a whispering pipe that made itself heard over ten miles of country like a melody dreamed rather than heard, and other-worldly even in a dream.

The running footsteps were quite lost now. He strained his ears, and could hear nothing but the last light sighing of the wind under the eaves of the hut.

He pushed the door to carefully, leaving only a narrow chink open; and tenderly he raised his long weapon, and slid it forward through the crack, drawing a bead upon the bushes at the end of the rock path.

After that there was silence. Even the wind had dropped in the height of the afternoon hush.

He watched the clump of bushes where the enemy lay hidden, and lost count of time. He had no attention to spare for any other spot in all that arena of grass and rock and scree. That was why he failed to see Karol Alda until he lay some twenty yards above and behind the rifleman in the bushes, at the rim of the circle round which Dominic’s feverish attention patrolled steadily and dutifully, all senses at strain. He froze, helpless and appalled.

So that was why Alda had accepted his role with such deceptive placidity, Alda with his adventurer’s face and his far-sighted eyes, the bandit-artist out of the lawless past, with the old brigand-songs ready on his tongue. He had never had the slightest intention of going for help. He was patiently, calmly, happily circling round above his enemy, unarmed as he was, dropping now into the perimeter of Dominic’s charmed circle, behind the gunman in the bushes.

And there was nothing, nothing at all, that Dominic could do to help him. Except, perhaps, show himself again outside the door, and that he could hardly do with conviction until the crucial moment. It couldn’t go on being convincing indefinitely, he had to save it as his trump-card. He held his breath, watching. The muzzle of the fujara sagged a little, and he jerked it back guiltily, his heart lurching and recovering in an instant.

How could he ever have thought that a man like Karol Alda would leave the sticky end to him? He might have known. He should have known.

The sun was still high, and shadows still short and black. There was only one way of moving in undetected from the south-west, and that was flat to the ground. Alda had a gift for this game, Dominic had to grant him that. He must have made a large circle to reach the place of vantage where he now lay. From the hut he looked as obtrusive as a lizard spread out in the heat on a sunlit wall, though he had rolled up the wide white sleeves of his shirt to his sunburned shoulders; but from where the enemy lay, equally flat to the ground in his thicket of gnarled bushes, Alda would be quite invisible. From here, too, cover looked pitifully thin between them; but he knew to his comfort that there was more of it than there seemed.

But the one man had a gun, and the other had only his hands, and the odds were crazy. He shouldn’t have done it. He should have made off down the valley to get help, as fast as he could. Dominic gnawed his knuckles and dripped sweat in an agony of helplessness. Even if he propped up the fujara here and made a run for it from the rear window now, he couldn’t possibly reach either the nearest cottage or Alda in time to affect the issue. All he could do was stare until his eyes glazed, and wait for the single decisive moment when he ought to draw the enemy’s fire again. It might all depend on his timing yet.

Another yard gained. Dominic caught the rapid, smooth movement as Alda flowed through the grass. Fifteen yards now between them, not more, and this afternoon hush over everything, not even a breath of wind to rustle the bushes and cover his advance. Nobody could be so silent as to leave that stillness undisturbed at only a few yards distance. The mystery was how he had got so close without betraying himself.

The bushes stirred stealthily, up there at the edge of the scar. A streak of brown slid out of cover beneath the silver-green branches, articulated, deliberate, grotesque, a man’s body. The man with the rifle had caught that last movement, and awakened to the near and perilous presence of his stalker. He was leaving his hide, slithering downhill flat on his belly, with the clump of bushes between him and his pursuer, feeling his way backwards to the edge of the rock slide, and cautiously over it.

Of course! He didn’t know whether his antagonist was armed or not, and he was taking no chances. He wanted rock, not bushes, between himself and Alda. He was easing himself down to a tenable hold, some five feet or so below the edge, where the stray boulders that fringed the broken ground would cover him.

The distant figure, featureless and anonymous, had turned its back now on the hut below, and paid no attention when Dominic, grasping with a revulsion of horror what was to come, flung the door wide and ran out into the open. He was no longer interested in any target but the unseen enemy in the grass above him, closing in coolly and patiently on the abandoned bushes, and gathering himself now for the final long leap downhill.

Dominic made a trumpet of his hands and yelled wildly aloft. And at the same moment Alda made his leap, beautifully and vainly gauged to drop him upon the very spot from which the other man had so silently withdrawn.

The rifle, its barrel a bluish gleam in the sun, was already braced and waiting for him. Dominic saw it flung up to meet the hurtling body, felt the tension of the firing arm like a pain transfixing his own flesh, and set his teeth and held his breath, steeled for the shot. A small, distant, dry, bright sound. The slopes took it up and tossed it among them in innumerable echoes, ripple on ripple, to die in the depths of the valley below.

The bushes threshed beneath Alda’s falling body, swallowing him from sight. Dominic drew breath in a wail of despair, and stood staring numbly, so sick with his own impotence that he saw what happened next only as an illogical sequence experienced in a dream, and for several seconds could make no sense of it in this disastrous daylight world.

The man braced on the rough run of the rock chute hung quite still for a long moment. Then slowly his arms sank and spread apart, and the rifle slithered from his hold, and drifted away from him almost languidly, to lodge in a tuft of grass ten feet below, and hang there gently rocking. His outspread hands clutched at the rock and the thinning soil beneath him, and found no purchase, or no strength to maintain their hold. His knees sagged gently under him, and his body began to slide, first with unbelievable slowness, then with gathering momentum, until it struck a projecting knuckle of rock, and was flung abruptly outwards towards the centre of the chute. It struck again, and rebounded, and came spinning and turning and bouncing downwards like a stone.

In the dwarf bushes above, Karol Alda gathered himself up nimbly, and slid hastily down the few yards to where the rock path began. He reached the edge just in time to see the rag-doll form strike the piled stones of the talus on the ledge below. A sudden convulsion shuddered through the whole laborious erection, running like a ripple from the shock, outward to either end. Particles of stone shifted, toppled, re-settled, and set their new neighbours shuddering in their turn. Then, with a sudden grinding roar, the whole unstable mass burst from its shaky moorings and exploded violently outwards over the valley, spitting rocks like chaff, and hurtled down with the body, in an earth-shaking thunder and a cloud of pallid dust, into the bottom of the bowl.