3

Above them came the sound of something scraping across the floor. The woman was hiding the trapdoor with furniture. Two Hawks took out his flashlight and examined the room. His nose had already told him that there were strips of garlic and sausage and other food hanging from the roughly hewn beams above. There was a door close by; he pushed this open and then turned off the light. Enough light came through several chinks in the log wall of the house above for him to see. The large chamber was lined with shelves on which sat dust-covered glass jars. These contained preserved fruits, vegetables, and jellies. On the floor beneath the shelves were piles of junk; stuff the owner had not been able to throw away or else considered worth repairing some day. One item that particularly caught his attention was a large wooden mask, broken off at one corner. To examine it closer, he turned on his flashlight. It portrayed the face of a demon or a monster, painted in garish scarlet, purple, and a dead-white.

“I don’t like being down here, Lieutenant,” O’Brien said. He came close to Two Hawks as if he found comfort in the proximity. Although it was cool in the dark cellar, the Irishman was sweating. He stank of fear.

Then he said, “There’s something funny as hell about all this. I meant to ask you, but I thought maybe you’d think I’d cracked. Did you feel as if you were being, well, sort of twisted. I got a sickish feeling, just before that German showed up. I thought I’d been hit at first. Then things got too exciting to think about it. But when we was back in the woods, sitting there, I got the same feeling. Only not so strong. Just feeling that there was something a lot more wrong than being shot down and hiding away from the krauts.”

“Yeah, I had the same feeling, too,” Two Hawks said. “But I can’t explain it.”

“I felt like, well, like Old Mother Earth herself had disappeared for a minute,” O’Brien said. “How about that, huh?”

Two Hawks did not answer. He heard the vehicle approaching down the road, then stop in front of the house. The motor sounded like an old Model T. He directed the sergeant to help him pile junk beneath one of the chinks and then stood up on the unstable platform. The hole was only a little larger than his eye, but it permitted him to see the car and the soldiers getting out of it. It was a peculiar looking vehicle, perhaps not so much peculiar as old-fashioned. He remembered O’Brien’s comment when they had first landed about the cars at the head of the ox-drawn wagon train.

Well, Rumania was supposed to be a very backward country, even if it had the largest and most modern oil refineries in Europe. And the soldiers certainly were not members of the Wehrmacht. On the other hand, their uniforms did not resemble anything in the illustrations he had seen during his briefing in Tobruk. The officer wore a shiny steel helmet shaped to look like a wolf’s head. There were even two steel ears. His knee-length jacket was a green-gray, but the collar had a strip of grayish animal fur sewed to it. There was an enormous gold-braided epaulette on each shoulder and a triple row of large shiny yellow buttons down the front of his jacket. His trousers were skintight, crimson, and had the head of a black bull on each leg just above the knees. He wore a broad leather belt with a holster. A strange-looking pistol was in his hand; he gestured with it while giving orders to his men in a Slavic-sounding speech. He turned and revealed that he was also wearing a sword in a scabbard on his left side. Shiny black calf-length boots completed his uniform.

Several of the soldiers were within Two Hawks’ range of vision. They wore helmets that had a neck-protecting nape, but the shape above the head was cylindrical, like a steel plug hat. Their black coats came to the waist in front, then curved to make a split-tail in back that fell just below the back of the knees. They had baggy orange trousers and jackboots. There were swords in the scabbards hanging from broad belts and rifles in their hands. The rifles had revolving chambers for the cartridges, like some of the old Western rifles.

All had full beards and long hair except for the officer. He was a clean-shaven youth, blond and pale, certainly not a dark Rumanian type.

The men scattered. There were shouts from above, the tread of boots on the floors, and smashing sounds. The officer walked out of sight, but Two Hawks could hear him talking slowly, as if in a language he had been taught in school. The woman answered in the same speech, which had to be her native tongue. Two Hawks found himself straining to catch its meaning, almost but not quite succeeding. Ten minutes passed. The soldiers reassembled. Frightened squawks announced the “expropriation” of hens. A certain amount of stealing was to be expected, Two Hawks thought, but by the woman’s own people? No, the soldiers could not be of the same nationality as she, otherwise there would be no language difficulty. Perhaps the woman belonged to one of the minorities of Rumania. It seemed logical, but he did not believe it.

Two Hawks waited. He could hear the soldiers laughing and talking loudly to each other. The woman was silent. About twenty minutes later, the officer apparently made up his mind that his men had had enough fun. He strode out of sight, and his voice came loudly to Two Hawks. Within a minute, the soldiers were lined up before him while he gave them a short but sharp lecture. Then they got into the car and drove off down the road.

“I don’t think they were looking for us,” Two Hawks said. “They must know that the house has a cellar. But if not us, what were they looking for?”

He wanted to go out immediately, but he decided that the soldiers could be coming back up the road soon or another group could pass by. Better for the woman to tell them when it was safe. The day passed slowly. There was no sound from outside for a long while except for the clucking hens and mooing cows.

It was not until dusk that they heard furniture moving above the trapdoor. The door creaked open, and light from a lamp streamed through the oblong.

Two Hawks took the automatic from O’Brien and went up first, determined to shoot anybody waiting for them. Despite all the evidences of her trustworthiness, he still was not sure that she had not changed her mind and summoned the troops. It did not seem very likely since the soldiers would not have bothered waiting around until dusk. But you never knew, and it was better to take no chances.

There was a man standing in one corner of the kitchen and munching on a piece of dried meat. Two Hawks, seeing he was unarmed except for a big knife in a scabbard sheath, put his automatic in his belt. The man looked at them stone-facedly. He was as dark as the woman and had an eagle- like nose and high cheekbones. His straight black hair was cut in the shape of a helmet—a German helmet. His black shirt and dirty brown pants looked as if they were made of some coarse and tough cotton. His boots were dirty. He stank as if he had been sweating out in the fields all day. He looked old enough to be the woman’s father and probably was.

The woman offered the two bowls of stew from the kettle still simmering in the fireplace. Neither was hungry, since they had been sampling the contents of the cellar. But Two Hawks thought it would be politic to accept. It was possible these people might believe that it was a gesture of hospitality and trust to offer a stranger food. They might believe that a man who ate under their roof was automatically sacrosanct. And the reverse could be true also. A stranger who accepted their bread would not break a tabu by harming them.

He explained this to O’Brien. While he was talking, he saw the farmer’s expression break loose from its stony cast. He looked puzzled and frowned as if he thought there was something familiar about the language. However, he had no more success in translating than Two Hawks had had with their language.