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.
Chapter 11
THE MAN WHO FAILED TO ARRIVE
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Down from the recesses of the northerly col Ondrejov came bouncing and rolling, that lumpy elderly body of his marvellously deft and rapid in movement, his rifle bumping vigorously at his hip as he ran. Hard on his heels came Miroslav Zachar, still in his leather motor-cycling jacket, and sweating profusely, and two young policemen in uniform. They descended upon the hut, where Dominic stood dazed and appalled, staring down into the cauldron below him, from which a thick, choking smoke of dust rose, and the last muted rumblings of the thunder.
Ondrejov turned him about by the shoulders, looked him over for damage, and found nothing worse than a scratched cheek.
“Well for you two,” he bellowed, clouting him boisterously behind in his relief, “that I’ve kept my hand in with a rifle. And well for you I had Mirek on your trail. He was waiting for you below, and you never came. You cost him a fine hunt before he found the van, and a fine fright I got when he rang up to tell me. If you youngsters would only do as you’re told! I had the road well covered for your sake, but we had to reorganise in a hurry. There’ll be two of us on their way up the valley now, and the rest of us came over the quickest way from Král’s inn. And lucky for you the first shot gave us our bearings. You’re all right?”