Horizon by Helen MacInnes Page A

clear?”
    “If you are expecting trouble, sir, then I’d better—”
    “No. You get back to the lorry to warn them.” The colonel’s voice was gloomy. His thin face was white under the starlight, but there was a determined cheerfulness in the smile he gave Lennox. Somehow it depressed Lennox still more. But his resentment against the colonel was disappearing. He was beginning to understand the colonel. He was even beginning to feel sorry for him.
    Lennox settled back into the shadow of a group of trees, watched the tall, thin figure hurry after Johann, and thenstared at the wood around him. “Rather he than I,” Lennox said to himself, as the officer followed Johann into the inn. He thought of the colonel’s gaunt white face, lined with perpetual anxieties, tight-lipped and cold-eyed with worry. That’s what responsibility did to a man. You could never make a decision without worrying whether it was the best one; you could never refuse a possibility without thinking of a lost opportunity. Whichever way you chose, you worried. Now the colonel was probably beginning to wish he hadn’t started on this plan of Johann’s. And yet, as Lennox waited, more nervously than he was willing to admit, he couldn’t see what else the colonel should have done. For the men in the prison camp had little chance as matters stood now: they hadn’t enough arms, they had wounded among them who couldn’t travel or fight, they didn’t know much about this countryside. The only alternative, as far as Lennox could see, would be for the band of prisoners to scatter and to look out each for himself. That would have been all right for Lennox or any who had been planning escape, but the others wouldn’t have much of a chance. And if any were captured then there would be no chance at all for them. The dead Germans in the little castle, up there on the hill behind him, would decide that.
    Lennox stared at the wood’s shadows around him. He stared at the door of the silent chalet. He stared at the faintly glowing numbers on his wrist-watch. He held the revolver in the German coat pocket so tightly that his weakened hand grew quite numb. Six minutes, eight minutes. He shifted his weight and tautened as a twig broke under his foot. Eleven minutes. The door opened at last. He raised the revolver slowly, supporting his hand with his left fist. The colonel was there all right. And Johann. Andtwo other men—young men by their easy stride. As the group approached him he could see the strangers were wearing the usual dress of the South Tyrol—leather breeches, light-coloured wool stockings, shapeless felt hats, tweed jackets.
    Lennox could see by the way the men walked that much had been decided. It didn’t need the colonel’s quiet “Everything laid on” to tell him that it had been thoroughly decided.
    As they left the clearing to plunge into the wood the colonel was saying, “These chaps have already moved all guns and ammunition from the barracks—they knew the Germans would occupy it as soon as the railway was secured. The guns have been hidden in this wood, and these men are going to help us load the lorry with what it can hold. They say they’ve enough ammunition, too. They will take care of our wounded, and shelter them until they are strong enough to follow us. They will give us guides to help us bypass the German troops in this valley. After that we fight on our own to the south. If we move quickly enough we have a sporting chance to reach the Allied front before the Germans can reinforce the gaps which the Italians have left in their defence lines. God knows where our front will be before we reach it; it may be in Rome and moving northwards before the month is out if the Italians really rise up against the Germans. But wherever they are we’ll make a stab at finding them. We can’t go far wrong if we keep going south.”
    Lennox said nothing for a full minute. Everything was settled, then; as fully settled as it could be. The