“What the hell’s he gibbering about?” O’Brien growled.

“Ask him something in Gaelic,” Two Hawks said.

“You nuts?” O’Brien replied, but he rattled off several sentences.

Dzikohses frowned and then threw his hands up as if to indicate that he was thrown for a complete loss. One thing Two Hawks was sure of, however. Dzikohses was no peasant. A linguist of his ability had to have traveled much or been well educated. And he bore himself as a man used to command.

Dzikohses became impatient. He gave several orders. The men checked their weapons; the girl pulled a revolver from under her loose foxskin jacket and examined the chambers. Dzikohses held out his hand for Two Hawks’ automatic. Smiling, Two Hawks shook his head. Slowly, so that he would not startle the others or cause them to misinterpret his actions, he took his automatic from his holster. He ejected the clip of bullets and then reinserted them, making sure the safety was on before he put the gun back into the holster.

The eyes of the others widened, and there was a starburst of questions from them. Dzikohses told them to shut up. The farmer extinguished the lamp, and the whole group left the shed. Within two minutes, they were in the woods. The farmer and the daughter bade them a soft goodbye, then returned under the light of the half-moon to their house.

All night, the party followed a path that left the shadows of the trees only when necessary to cross fields to get from one wood to another. They saw nothing to disturb them and, shortly before dawn, they bedded down for the day in a broad hollow deep inside the forest. Their travel had been generally northeastward.

Before falling asleep under a pile of leaves, O’Brien asked Two Hawks if they were going towards Russia. Two Hawks said he thought so.

“These people ain’t Russians or Rumanians either,” O’Brien said. “When I was a kid in Chicago, I lived in a neighborhood that had some Russkies and Rumanians, so I know these people ain’t talking neither. What in hell are these gooks?”

“They’re speaking some obscure dialect,” Two Hawks said. He did not think that now was the time to spring some of his speculations on O’Brien. They would only confuse him. Besides, they were so fantastic, that he could not seriously entertain them himself.

O’Brien said, “You know something else that’s funny? Back there at that farmer’s, and on all the other farms we seen, there wasn’t a single horse. You suppose the Krauts took them all?”

“Somebody did,” Two Hawks said. “Better get to sleep. It’s going to be a long tough night tomorrow.”

It was also a long tough day. The huge mosquitoes that had made their life hell during the night did not go away with the daylight. When he could stand it no longer, Two Hawks awoke Dzikohses. With sign language, he made it apparent that he would now accept the offer he had previously turned down. He took the little bottle Dzikohses handed him and poured out a thin liquid. It had the vilest, most stomach-turning odor he had ever been unfortunate enough to whiff. But it kept the mosquitoes away. He smeared it over his face and the back of his hands, then burrowed under the leaves. The leaves protected the rest of him, since the needle-suckers of the mosquitoes seemed to go through even his clothing. He could understand now why the others wore such heavy garments even in the heat of summer. It was either suffer from the heat, which was endurable, or go mad from the unendurable stabs of the mosquitoes.

Even shielded from the insects, he did not sleep heavily. By noon, the woods became hot, and what with the sweat encasing him and the sounds of men turning over, rustling the leaves, or eliminating nearby, he woke frequently. Once, he opened his eyes to see the hatchet face and black eyes of Dzikohses over him. Two Hawks grinned at him and turned over on his side. He was helpless; he could be disarmed or killed at any time. But, so far, Dzikohses had shown no inclination to treat him as a possible enemy. Plainly, he was puzzled by everything about the two strangers. No more puzzled by us than I am about him, Two Hawks thought, and slid back into his bumpy sleep.

At dusk, they ate dried beef and hard black bread and drank from canteens filled from a nearby creek. The men then all faced east and took from their leather provision-packs strings of beads and various carved wooden images. They put the strings of beads around their necks and began telling them with the left hands while they held the wooden images up above their heads in their right hands. Their voices murmured what seemed to be chants, although the chants were not all the same. Two Hawks was startled by the image held by the man nearest him. It was the head of a mammoth, its proboscis curled aloft as if trumpeting, its long tusks curving upwards, its eyes little gems that glared red.

The men were standing up and facing east. The blonde squatted, facing westwards. She, too, told beads, but did it with her right hand. She had taken a silver stickpin from her bag and driven it into the earth before her. Now, regarding the image fixedly, her lips moved, and only by getting very close to her could Two Hawks distinguish the words of her slow measured speech. Now he heard a language none had spoken before. It sounded Semitic to him, and he could have sworn that he heard more than once words similar to the Hebrew “Ba’al” and “Adoni”. The silver image was a symbolic representation of a tree from which a man hung, the rope around his neck tied with nine knots.

It was all very strange. O’Brien shivered and swore, crossed himself, and said a rapid Paternoster in a very low voice. Then he said, “Lieutenant, what kind of heathens have we fallen among?”

“I wish I knew,” Two Hawks replied. “Anyway, let’s not worry about their religion. If they get us to neutral territory, or to Russia, they’ve done their jobs.”

The ceremonies took about three minutes. The beads and idols (if they were idols) were put away, the march was resumed. Not until midnight did they stop. Two men slipped into a village only a hundred yards away. They returned in fifteen minutes with more dried strips of beef, black bread, and six bottles of a very sour wine. All took a swig from the bottles, and then the fast walking was resumed. At dawn, as they bedded down, they heard the far-off boom of big cannon. Sometime late in the afternoon, Two Hawks was awakened by O’Brien. The Irishman pointed upwards through a break in the trees, and Two Hawks saw a huge silvery sausage shape passing at about a thousand feet overhead.

“That sure as hell looks like one of them dirigibles I read about when I was a kid,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t know the Krauts still had ‘em.”

“They don’t,” Two Hawks said.

“Yeah? How do you account for that, then? The Russians use ‘em?”

“Maybe,” Two Hawks said. “They got a lot of obsolete equipment.”

He did not believe that the airship was Russian or German. But he might as well keep O’Brien from panicking now. Once the full truth was known, of course, O’Brien would have to go through an inevitable terror. Two Hawks hoped he could take it. He was having enough trouble quelling his own panic.

He sat up, yawned, stretched, and pretended an indifference he did not feel. The girl was sleeping near him; her lips were slightly open. Despite the dirt and the mosquito-repelling grease on her face, she looked cute. Like a pre-adolescent child who had been too tired to wash her face before going to bed. By now he knew her name, Huskarle Ilmika Thorrsstein. Huskarle, however, might be her title, corresponding to Lady. She was treated with great respect by the others.

She did not sleep very long, however. Dzikohses woke them all up, and they began walking in the daylight now. Apparently, he felt that they were far enough from the enemy to venture out under the sun. They saw very few farms after that, and the going became rougher. For several days the hills continued to get larger and the woods thicker. Then they were in the mountains. Two Hawks consulted his map. According to it, they should not yet be in the Carpathians. But they were here, and there was no use denying the reality of the mountains. Moreover, they seemed to him to be higher than the map indicated.