simpered, and shot him through the face.

As Carfax pitched forward, Gary fired.

"Missed me, by God!" laughed Flint. "Shoot? Hell, yes. I'll show you how
to shoot----"

He struck the lighted candle with his left hand and laughed again in the
thick darkness.

"Shoot? I'll show you how to shoot, you old slacker----"

Gary fired.

After a silence Flint giggled in the choking darkness as the door opened
cautiously again, and shot at the terrified orderly.

"I'm a cockney, am I? And you don't think much of the Devon cuckoos, do
you? Now I'll show you that I understand all kinds of cuckoos----"

Both flashes split the obscurity at the same moment. Flint fell back
against the wall and slid down to the floor. The outer door began to open
again cautiously.

But the orderly, half dressed, remained knee-deep in the snow by the
doorway.

After a long interval Gary struck a match, then went over and lit the
candle. And, as he turned, Flint fired from where he lay on the floor and
Gary swung heavily on one heel, took two uncertain steps. Then his pistol
fell clattering; he sank to his knees and collapsed face downward on the
stones.

Flint, still lying where he had fallen, partly upright, against the wall,
began to laugh, and died a few moments later, the wind from the slowly
opening door stirring his fair hair and extinguishing the candle.

And at last, through the opened door crept Carfax's orderly; peered into
the darkness within, shivering in his unbuttoned tunic, his boots wet with
snow.

Dawn already whitened the east; and up out of the ghastly fog edging the
German Empire, silhouetted, monstrous, against the daybreak, soared a
_Laemmergeyer_, beating the livid void with enormous, unclean wings.

The orderly heard its scream, shrank, cowering, against the door frame as
the huge bird's ferocious red and yellow eyes blazed level with his.

Suddenly, above the clamor of the _Laemmergeyer_, the shrill bell of the
telephone began to ring.

The terrible racket of the _Laemmergeyer_ filled the sky; the orderly
stumbled into the room, slipped in a puddle of something wet, sent an
empty bottle rolling and clinking away into the darkness; stumbled twice
over prostrate bodies; reached the telephone, half fainting; whispered for
help.

After a long, long while, the horror still thickly clogging vein and
brain, he scratched a match, hesitated, then holding it high, reeled
toward the door with face averted.

Outside