“Lossberg has got his skirts clear.” he told Barbara. “He feels himself strong and secure enough to take the offensive. That means that Lord Clanroyden’s scheme has miscarried. Lossberg, in spite of his pinpricks, is getting all the supplies he wants, and has leisure to make a bold attack on our base. He is neither rattled nor embarrassed, and he has no notion of making peace. Clanroyden’s was an ingenious plan, but it was bluff, and the bluff has been called. Once it fails, we have no second string. It is our turn to be driven from post to pillar… and there’s far more against us than Lossberg. We have no news of Lady Roylance?”
There was more than exasperation in his tone as he spoke, there was an aching anxiety. Barbara, who in these last lays had become a tense, silent being, looked at him curiously.
“I think that we have succeeded in one thing, Excellency,” she said.
“What?”
“We have made you an ally. This war was directed against you. Now you speak as if you were sorry that it was not going better.”
“Nonsense,” he said sharply. “I am anxious about Lady Roylance.”
Next day there was disquieting information. Loa had been evacuated in the night owing to Lossberg’s pressure, and that general was now beginning his movement northward on scientific lines. His mounted troops were clearing and guarding his flanks, his pioneers were pushed forward to improve the roads for his batteries, and two of his mechanised battalions were already in the foothills. Their progress could be delayed, but with Sandy and the bulk of his force engaged at the other side of the Gran Seco it could not be seriously opposed. Sandy had long ago decided that it was no part of his business to resist any movement of Lossberg’s too long.
Grayne rapidly calculated.
“He will take four days at the earliest to get here. We could lengthen them out to six, but it isn’t worth it. That gives us plenty of time, for we’ve got all the details of the evacuation settled long ago. The stuff we’re taking with us has already begun to leave for Magdalena… No, Miss Babs, I guess Lossberg can’t hit off that road, It’s our covered Valley of Virginia, and he could no more stop our using it than General Banks could stop Stonewall Jackson. It’s way out of the reach of his patrols. But we can’t cut it too fine. Before his first troops get to the place they call Three Fountains, every soul here has to be on the road to Magdalena and this place one big bonfire.”
Barbara asked about the sea-ravine.
“We’ll get early news of that from the air,” was the answer. “I’m not going to waste one solitary man on holding it. We’ve had it mined and monkeyed with, so as it will be a steep mountaineering proposition for the dago sailormen, but it’s not going to be anything more. We’ll retire shelf by shelf and watch the fireworks.”
Two nights later it was reported by wireless that destroyers had left Olifa for the north, and the following morning they were sighted by Grayne’s air scouts about twenty miles south of the Courts of the Morning. This news enabled Grayne to adjust his time-table. The destroyers entered the gulf at 11.30 a.m., but they seemed to find difficulty with that uncharted coast, and it was well into the afternoon before they attempted to their men. Corbett and his garrison had been withdrawn from the shore, and the hut left apparently intact. But the first mariners who entered it had various unpleasing surprises, with the result that the occupation of the beach became a matter of careful reconnaissance, and darkness had fallen before the last of the landing-parties was on shore. Corbett, now at Post No. I, waited grimly for the morning advance.
The last day in the sanctuary was for Barbara like some strange motion-picture seen from uneasy stalls. She had nothing to do except to wait and watch. The Courts been dismantled till they looked like a disused builder’s yard. The tall poles of the wireless installation had gone, the huts were empty, the great storehouse was bare except for the inflammable material which could be fired by a single fuse. One solitary aeroplane patrolled the sky. White mechanics, troopers, mestizos, Indians, all had gone except the guard which was to accompany herself and the Gobernador. It was a clear brightly-lit day and rather cold. From the sea-ravine could be heard an occasional rumble and sputter of fire, but the only garrison left there now was Corbett and two of his lieutenants. The Olifa advance was three-quarters of the way up the ravine, and Corbett had been ordered, after seeing to the last great explosion, to make his best speed to the huts. As Barbara looked round the deserted camp which for weeks had been her home, she wanted to cry.
Departure seemed a farewell both to her hopes and her friends.
The Gobernador, muffled in a great blanket-coat, joined her. He too looked at the bare walls and the desolate compounds.
“That is the curse of war,” he said. “It makes one destroy what one loves.”
“I feel as if I were leaving home,” said Barbara.
“I did not mean this place,” was the answer. “I was linking of Lady Roylance.”
Presently there fell on their ears a dull roar from the direction of the sea-ravine. Grayne appeared with his watch his hand.
“Time to start now, Miss Babs. Corbett will be here in five minutes. Lossberg is a mile short of Three Fountains.”
They mounted their wiry little horses, while the guardian aeroplane flew very slowly to the south. It was almost dusk, and as they turned into the forest trail they stopped instinctively for one look backward. Suddenly the Courts were bright with tongues of fire, and Corbett and his assistants joined them. It was to the accompaniment of roaring fires behind, which made a rival glow to the sunset, that party disappeared into the gloom of the trees. As they bent eastward under the skirts of the mountain the crackling and the glow died away, and presently, at a headland above a deep glen, Grayne halted. From far away in the muffled foothills to the south came the chatter of machine guns.
“That is the last word,” he said. “Lossberg is at Three Fountains and our defence is falling back to join us. I’m sorry. I’d got to like the old place.”
For hours they rode through the dark forest. There was no moon, and the speed was poor, for they guided themselves only by contact. The Indians who led the way had to move slowly to keep pace with the groping, jostling cavalcade behind. Barbara and Castor rode in the centre of the group and, full of their own thoughts, spoke scarcely a word to each other, except of apology for a sudden jolt. The Gobernador had accompanied them without protest. He seemed to have no ear for the distant rat-tat of the machine guns of his friends.
About ten o’clock they halted to bivouac for the night.
It was a hollow tucked between the knees of the mountain spurs. Some summer thunderstorm had once set the forest alight, and for acres beside the stream there was bare ground carpeted with moss and studded with the scarred stumps of trees. Half a dozen fires were soon burning, and supper was eaten from the saddle-bags. Barbara had her sleeping-tent, but she ate with Castor beside one of the bivouacs. She noticed how clumsily he dismounted from his horse, and how stiffly he moved. This was not the life he knew, and he was no longer young.
It was a quiet night without a breath of wind, but chilling towards frost. The sky was ablaze with stars, which there in the open gave light enough to show the dim silhouettes of the overhanging hills. As the two sat side by side in the firelight, Castor smoking his pipe, his figure hunched in that position peculiar to townsmen who try to reproduce in the wilds the comfort of a chair, the girl realised that something had happened. Hitherto she had felt it a duty to entertain the Gobernador, making conversation as one does with a stranger. Now she found that there was no such need. She could be silent without impoliteness. He had become her friend, as he had been Janet’s, a member of her world, whose thoughts she could instinctively discern, and who could anticipate