Horizon by Helen MacInnes Page B

men up in the castle had now, at least, a fighting chance. Sporting was the word that the colonel had used. Fighting would be nearer the truth. After his years of experience with the Italians Lennox wasn’t so sure that the Allies’ path to Rome would be madeeasy for them. He was willing to bet that the colonel had not been fighting long in the Mediterranean theatre. The colonel still believed in the milk of human kindness.
    “What’s the guarantee of good faith, sir?” he asked quietly. These Tyrolese had given too much without demanding something in return.
    “You are. You are going up there with the boy, Johann.” The colonel pointed north-east where the black mass of jagged peaks rose beyond the river Eisak. “There is a plateau up there which they call the Schlern. You will stay there, keeping your ears and eyes well open, until some of our men can be dropped in to join you.”
    Lennox stared through the darkness. The colonel must have felt his amazement, for he said quickly, “When we reach the Allied lines we’ll get Intelligence on to the job. They’ll send some of their men by parachute on to the Schlern to join you. We’ll build up something there that will jolt the Huns.”
    Lennox thought of several observations to make on such optimism, but none seemed suitable to a superior officer. He said, more quietly than he felt, “Very good, sir.”
    The men round the lorry listened to the colonel’s instructions. Below them the lights in the town pin-pricked the darkness. The three Tyrolese stood quietly competent, eagerly ready. Everything was, as the colonel had first said, everything was laid on.
    * * *
    The lorry had started back up the hill with its load of men and guns. (“Enough,” the colonel had said, “enough for a starter, anyway. We’ll collect more on our way south.”)
    Johann touched Lennox’s arm. The Englishman waswatching the crawling truck, already part of the night’s blackness. Then he turned to follow the boy. To the north-east the mountains were still as remote and fantastic as they had seemed to Lennox staring at them through the barbed wire of a prison camp. Then they had been remote and fantastic because they had symbolised freedom. Now they themselves had become a prison, from which there was no escape. And he was walking into that prison, if not willingly then certainly without a revolver at his back.
    “Why do you laugh?” Johann asked curiously. “It isn’t wise to laugh yet. We are too near these houses. Tomorrow, up on the Schlern, you can laugh all you want to.”
    Lennox was suddenly serious. “Yes, I’ll laugh then,” he said grimly. He followed the boy’s sure steps, and wondered how many weeks it would take his comrades to reach the Allied lines. But he didn’t let himself think of the feeling they would have when they could be back with their own people again.
    Johann’s quiet voice held its own revolt. “I had other plans too, for tonight,” he was saying, almost reprovingly. “My girl is down in Bozen, and when I don’t turn up to see her as I promised she will start worrying about the stray bullets which were flying this afternoon. And I don’t know whether she is safe either. She is not the kind to stay at home and hide under the bed. So,” his voice sharpened, “let’s start moving.”
    Lennox thought how easy it was to forget that other people had their own private worries and disappointments. To appease this sudden twinge of conscience, he said politely, “Is she from the Tyrol too?”
    “Eva?” Johann asked quickly, and by that quickness and that pleased note in his voice he showed that he wanted theother’s friendship. “Yes, she’s from my village. Now she is living in Bozen with relatives.” The boy talked on, quietly, interminably—about his village, which had been called Montefierro for the last twenty-four years, but which now reverted to the name of Hinterwald that had suited it very well for over three hundred years; about