XXIII

The delay in procuring the mules retarded their journey by three or four hours, and in spite of their urgency, and the offer of double and treble pay alike to landlord and muleteers, Clive and Sefton did not get away from the inn till close upon eight o’clock that morning.

By noon, however, thanks to the good pace of the animals when found, they succeeded in reaching the pasture tablelands of La Sila, which in the summer is the scene of a vast migration of shepherds and their flocks from the plains below.

The hour of Ave Maria found these plains with their meandering streams and shadowy beech forests some three thousand feet below them, and entirely hidden from their view by the intervening perpendicular rocks.

A white pebbly fiumara, or dry torrent course, then became their road. It wound away steadily upward for some three or four miles; the rocks on either side of it closing in, near and nearer the higher they went, until at length little more than a broad ribbon of blue sky seemed left to them overhead.

Landscape there was none. Where the sharp perpendicular rocks on either side split, as it were, and the eye wandered there for a glimpse of surrounding scenery, or, as in the case of Clive and Sefton, in hopes of catching a distant view of Alta Lauria, it was met only by other sharp perpendicular rocks, or perhaps by some ravine choked with earthquake-riven blocks of granite; or some yawning chasm showing black now in the fading daylight.

And everywhere silence, solitude⁠—intense, profound. It seemed a place for shades and ghosts to wander in, rather than men endowed with senses that loved light and colour, glow and variety in beauty.

“They’re taking us all right, I suppose; this path seems endless,” said Clive, addressing Sefton in English.

Sefton made no reply. He had descended from his mule, which he was leading over a rough part of the road. His head was bent, he seemed lost in thought.

So Clive addressed an equivalent question in Italian to Ditta.

“How much more of this? How many kilos?” he asked.

The man shrugged his shoulders, and answered that another two hours would bring them in sight of Alta Lauria.

After all, hours measured their road better than kilos. Their day’s march, so far, could have been accomplished in less than half the time along an English country road.

It would have been useless to deny, young and muscular though they were, that the fatigue of their day’s mountaineering following on the heels of their rapid travelling from Paris was beginning to tell on them.

Clive noticed that during the last two hours of this seemingly endless pass, Sefton’s brandy-flask went very often to his lips.

Their strip of blue sky overhead presently told them that the sun was setting, the deep, level blue catching all sorts of wondrous tints, changeful, oscillating, undefinable as the colours in a dove’s wing.

Then these, too, in their turn vanished, leaving what had been level blue before level grey now, deepening in parts into the night blue of an Italian sky.

And then a slow, white radiance spreading athwart this, told them that the moon had risen.

Straight in front of them their path took a sudden sharp curve.

Sefton and Clive were walking side by side now, and the guides were following with the four mules.

“When we round that curve we get in sight of Alta Lauria,” said Sefton.

He stood still for a moment, leaning his back against a huge block of granite which might have suggested the thought that the Titans, when building the mountains, had let fall one of their bricks.

“Better mount,” said Clive; “you’re getting footsore.”

During this, the last day of their journey together, his heart had softened towards his companion in a way that, taking all things into consideration, seemed even to himself unaccountable.

Sefton, however, had no intention of mounting. He let the guides with their mules pass on ahead, then he lowered his voice almost to a whisper.

“Redway,” he said, “I’ve been thinking over a good many things during the last half-hour, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’ll be of no use for either of us to show fight.”

“Show fight! Where, when, how?” asked Clive, looking all round as if in search of some hidden foe, and feeling instinctively for his revolver.

“That’ll be of no use to you,” said Sefton, noting the movement; “if one of those skulking cowards attacks us there’ll be at least half-a-dozen in hiding to back him up. Besides⁠—” here he broke off with a short laugh, “we won’t have unnecessary bloodshed. They’d rather not touch you if it can be helped⁠—it’s me⁠—my life they want⁠—not yours.”

“Why must there be any attacking?” said Clive. “We’ve got so far on our journey unmolested. Alta Lauria is almost in sight now. There’s no sign of anyone skulking about.”

His eye scanned the rocks right and left of him as he ended his sentence.

“They wouldn’t be such fools as to attack us here,” replied Sefton; “there’s no hiding-place out of which they could take sure aim. It would be a case of fair fight, man to man, face to face. No, wait till we’ve rounded that point there, straight ahead of us, and you’ll see what I mean.”

Clive suddenly paused, looking Sefton straight in the face.

“Do you suppose,” he cried, with a fierce impetuosity for which the other was not prepared, “that I’ve travelled with you side by side all these miles, and then intend to stand by and see you butchered? Do you imagine I’ve brought my revolver for nothing?”

Sefton grew excited also.

“That’s it,” he cried. “I knew that was in your mind. It would be madness⁠—sheer madness for you to attempt that sort of thing. Supposing you put a bullet into a man, what then? There’d be a dozen knives out at you at once. And then what becomes of Ida?”

That was a question not easy to answer. Clive remained silent.

Sefton went on:

“What are those fellows in front good for? Would they go on to the Palazzo and be a safe conduct for Ida back to England? No. They’d just run away as fast as their legs would carry them, or else fraternise with the scoundrels who had knocked us over. No, you must do as I tell you. Promise me.”

There fell a long silence. The crack of the whips of the muleteers, their loud-voiced “Hola, huepe!” to the animals, together with a jangling of bells, broke the intense stillness; but there came never a word from Clive.

Sefton went on impetuously as before.

“I want your word of honour⁠—nothing else will satisfy me⁠—that if I am attacked you won’t show fight, but will push straight on with the guides to the Palazzo, demand to see Ida, and then not trust her out of your sight till you get clear of this accursed hole. Will you do this?⁠—give me your word of honour that you will.”

“Upon my life, Culvers, I can’t,” Clive exclaimed, vehemently, “or if I did, it would be of no use. I’m confident if I saw a rifle pointed at you, or a knife raised, I should forget all about my word of honour, and out with my revolver at once.”

The two men had again come to a standstill in the narrow pass, and were now facing each other. On their right hand the rocks rose straight and sheer, with never a break in them; on their left a huge rift let in a gleam of the fast-fading twilight, showed a vista of fantastic yet still perpendicular rocks beyond, showed, too, the deep black chasm that their path was skirting.

“What is your revolver like?” asked Sefton. “Six-chambered, I suppose?”

Clive, thinking that he was weighing the chances of its being of use to them, drew it from his pocket and handed it to him.

“It’s simply perfect. I know of no better make,” he said.

Sefton looked at it critically, then he made a step towards the rift in the rocks which let in the twilight, as if to get a better view of the toy-like weapon.

And then, before Clive could realise what was in his mind, he had leaned over the blocks and boulders which separated their path from the precipice it skirted, and the revolver was flung into the darkness of the chasm.

Clive turned upon him furiously.

“You’d no right to do such a thing,” he cried; “it was treacherous of you. At least you should have given me a choice in the matter.”

Sefton, for once in his life, met anger with calmness.

“I tell you you have no choice in the matter⁠—the choice remains with me, and I have made it. Try and face the fact that we are in a position in which weapons are of no use to us. If we are not attacked, well and good, we don’t require our revolvers; if we are, all your revolver would do would be to sign your own death-warrant, it wouldn’t save my life. When we round that point, as I told you before, you’ll see what I mean. Don’t you see, man, what deadly earnest I am in?”

And “deadly earnest” was written on his white face, set teeth, and rigid, knotted brow as plainly as it could well be.

Then, in a silence that neither of the two men were in the mood to break, they made the rest of the distance that lay between them and the sharp curve of the rocks.

When they rounded that curve Clive saw in a moment what Sefton had meant.

The narrow mountain pass came to an end there, and the path wound steadily downwards into a dark, well-wooded ravine, in which lay hidden all that called itself the village of Alta Lauria. High over this ravine, on the farther side, straight in front of them, stood the Palazzo, crushed and squeezed, as it were, into a nest of whitely-gleaming rocks.

Higher still, over the Palazzo itself, hung a great, white, staring moon, cutting into sharp relief against the lucent night sky every fantastic crag and turret of the uppermost heights, and piling its shadows upon the dark, wooded ravine, till it showed like the Valley of the Shadow of Death itself.

And the path at the head of which Sefton and Clive now stood led straight into it.

A bare, pebbly path it ran for about twenty yards or so, then it sloped gradually downwards into what seemed a wood of ilex and wild olive, and where the only road appeared to be that which wayfarers themselves had trampled down into the semblance of one.

Ditta brought his mules to a standstill, to ask if the gentlemen would like to mount, or would they rather walk through the wood, and mount at the farther end.

“How far does this wood go⁠—how many kilos?” questioned Clive, trying to gauge the danger that might threaten now.

The man replied that it was something over two kilos; that it was easier to walk it, as there was so much scrubby underwood, in which the mules were apt to get entangled. On the other side the road grew rocky and steep once more, and then it might be as well to mount.

“We’ll walk,” said Sefton, with great decision. “Mules would be no good to us in that tangle.”

The muleteers went on ahead once more, with their cracking whips, and “holas,” and “huepes,” urging on their tired animals, till together they disappeared amid the shadows of the ilexes and wild olives.

Was it fancy, Clive asked himself, or did there come, together with the shouts and cracking of whips, a sound of movement, of trampling from out the shadowy depths of the wood, that seemed something other than the tramp of the mules and the muleteers?

Sefton heard it, not a doubt. With a sudden, impetuous bound he dashed ahead of Clive some half-dozen yards, then came to a standstill.

The moon lighted up his set, white face as he turned it towards the edge of the wood whence the sound had seemed to come.

“Here, you fellows in hiding there!” he cried in Italian, in a loud, ringing voice; “I’m a soldier, and an Englishman! If you want my life put a bullet into me! Don’t rush out at me with your confounded butchers’ knives as if I were a sheep!”

Swift and sharp there came the answer he expected; the click of a rifle, the whizzing of a bullet, and Sefton Culvers fell a dead man at Clive’s very feet.