kle. "Don't
you see yourself toppling it over and having the police down upon
you?... You'd better make a strategic movement to the rear, my
friend!..."

But he had not finished speaking when another cry reached his ears.

"Ah, this time," said Morestal, "you'll admit...."

"Yes ... yes ..." Jorance agreed. "An owl gives a duller, slower
hoot.... It really is like a signal, a hundred yards or so ahead of
us.... Smugglers, of course, French or German."

"Suppose we turned back?" said Morestal. "Aren't you afraid of being
mixed up in an affair?..."

"Why? It's the custom-house people's business; it doesn't concern you
and me. They can settle it among themselves...."

They listened for a moment and then went on, thoughtfully, with watchful
ears.

After the Butte-aux-Loups, the ridge becomes flatter, the forest spreads
out and the road, now freer, winds among the trees, runs from one slope
to the other, avoids the big roots, passes round the inequalities of the
ground and, at times, disappears from sight under a bed of dead leaves.

But the moon had come out again and Morestal walked straight in front of
him, without hesitation. He knew the frontier so well! He could have
followed it with his eyes closed, in the dusk of the darkest night! At
one place, there was a branch that blocked the way; at another, there
was the trunk of an old oak which sounded hollow when he hit it with his
stick. And he announced the branch before he came to it; and he struck
at the old oak.

His uneasiness, which began to seem unreasonable, was dispelled.
Consulting his watch again, he hurried his steps, so as to reach home by
the time which he had said.

But suddenly he stopped. He thought he saw a shadow hiding, thirty or
forty yards away from him:

"Did you see?" he whispered.

"Yes ... I saw...."

And, all at once, there came a shrill, strident whistle, apparently from
the very place where the shadow had vanished.

"Don't move," said Jorance.

They waited, their hearts tense with the anguish of what was coming.

A minute passed and more minutes; and then there was a sound of
footsteps, below them, on the German side, the sound of a man
hurrying....

Morestal thought of the precipitous hill which he had described to
Dourlowski as the way up to the frontier from the Albern Woods, by the
Cold Spring, the Fontaine-Froide. In all certainty, somebody was scaling
the upper portion of that precipice, clinging on to the branches