Mad all through, disgust, indecision, gave rapid place to nervous alarm.  Every quill rose in wrath; the snowy crest stood upright; the yellow eyes flashed fire.

Then, suddenly, the eagle sprang into the air, yelping fierce protest against such treatment:  the shrilling of the bell swept like a thin gale through the forest, keener, louder, as the enraged bird climbed the air, mounting, mounting into the dazzling blue above until the motionless watchers in the woods below saw him wheel.

Which way would he turn?  ’Round and round swept the eagle in wider and more splendid circles; in tensest suspense the two below watched motionless.

Then the tension broke; and a dry sob escaped the girl.

For the eagle had set his lofty course at last.  Westward he bore through pathless voids uncharted save by God alone—­who has set His signs to mark those high blue lanes, lest the birds—­His lesser children—­should lose their way betwixt earth and moon.

CHAPTER IX

THE BLINDER TRAIL

There was no escape that way.  From the northern and eastern edges of the forest sheer cliffs fell away into bluish depths where forests looked like lawns and the low uplands of the Alsatian border resembled hillocks made by tunnelling moles.  And yet it was from somewhere not far away that a man once had been, carried safely into Alsace on a sudden snowslide.  That man now lay among the trees on the crag’s edge looking down into the terrific chasm below.  He and the girl who crouched in the thicket of alpine roses behind him seemed a part of the light-flecked forest—­so inconspicuous were they among dead leaves and trees in their ragged and weather-faded clothing.

They were lean from physical effort and from limited nourishment.  The skin on their faces and hands, once sanguine and deeply burnt by Alpine wind and sun and snow glare, now had become almost colourless, so subtly the alchemy of the open operates on those whose only bed is last year’s leaves and whose only shelter is the sky.  Even the girl’s yellow hair had lost its sunny brilliancy, so that now it seemed merely a misty part of the lovely, subdued harmony of the woods.

The man, still searching the depths below with straining, patient gaze, said across his shoulder: 

“It was here somewhere—­near here, Yellow-hair, that I went over, and found what I found....  But it’s not difficult to guess what you and I should find if we try to go over now.”

“Death?” she motioned with serene lips.

He had turned to look at her, and he read her lips.

“And yet,” he said, “we must manage to get down there, somehow or other, alive.”

She nodded.  Both knew that, once down there, they could not expect to come out alive.  That was tacitly understood.  All that could be hoped was that they might reach those bluish depths alive, live long enough to learn what they had come to learn, release the pigeon with its message, then meet destiny in whatever guise it confronted them.