e; that's my idea," he said. "I
don't know which I can stand most comfortably, your voices or your
silence. Both make me sick."

"Some day a salamander will nip you; then you'll go loco," observed Gary,
balancing another tennis ball in his right hand. "Give me a shot at you?"
he added. "I feel as though I could throw it clean through you. You look
soft as a pudding to me."

Far, clear, from infinite depths, the elf-like hail of the cuckoo came
floating up to the window.

To Flint, English born, the call meant more than it did to Canadian or
Yankee.

"In Devon," he said in an altered voice, "they'll be calling just now.
There's a world of primroses in Devon.... And the thorn is as white as the
damned snow is up here."

Gary growled his impatience and his profile of a Greek fighter showed in
clean silhouette against the window.

"Aw, hell," he said, "did I come out here for this?--nine months of it?"
He hurled the tennis ball at the wall. "Can the home talk, if you don't
mind."

The cuckoo was still calling.

"Did you ever play cuckoo," asked Carfax, "at ten shillings a throw? It's
not a bad game--if you're put to it for amusement."

Nobody replied; Gray's sunken, boyish face betrayed no interest; he
continued to toss a tennis ball against the wall and catch it on the
rebound.

Toward sundown the usual Alpine chill set in; a mist hung over the
snow-edged cliffs; the rocks breathed steam under a foggy and battered
moon.

CHAPTER III

CUCKOO!

Carfax, on duty, sat hunched up over the telephone, reporting to the
fortress.

Gray came in, closed the wooden shutters, hung blankets over them, lighted
an oil stove and then a candle. Flint took up the cards, looked at Gary,
then flung them aside, muttering.

Nobody attempted to read; nobody touched the cards again. An orderly came
in with soup. The meal was brief and perfectly silent.

Flint said casually, after the table had been cleared: "I haven't slept
for a month. If I don't get some sleep I'll go queer. I warn you; that's
all. I'm sorry to say it, but it's so."

"They're dirty beasts to keep us here like this," muttered Gary--"nine
months of it, and not a shot."

"There'll be a few shots if things don't change," remarked Flint in a
colourless voice. "I'm getting wrong in my head. I can feel it."

Carfax turned from the switchboard with a forced laugh: "Thinking of
shooting up the camp?"

"That or myself," replied Flint in a quiet voice;