The Piper on the Mountain

“A rifle?” Alda whirled on him with a face of blank, disdainful astonishment. “I carry a rifle? I don’t think I’ve ever even had one in my hands. You’re dreaming.”

“But I did see you with it, up on the crests,” protested Dominic, shaken. “A great long stock sticking up over your shoulder, and the barrel…”

He broke off, hopelessly confounded. Alda had flattened his wide shoulders against the shadowy wall of the hut beside the window, and was laughing his heart out.

“I don’t understand.” Dominic was on his feet, his face burning, a little from the conviction that he had somehow made himself foolish, but much more from the becherovka. “In any case I’d really stopped believing it was you doing the shooting, before I came up here looking for you, but I know what I saw…”

“But you don’t! That’s exactly what you don’t know, but I do, now. This… this is what you saw.” He crossed the dim room in three vehement strides to the corner behind the iron stove, cluttered with tools, and draped with the black felt cloak he had worn in the storm, and disentangled from behind its veiling folds a long object, which he brought forward into the light from the window, and held upright for inspection, laughing still.

It was within three inches as tall as Alda himself, and about as thick as a child’s wrist, a tube of pale wood polished by age and handling. To the back of it, at the upper end, was secured by closely plaited hemp cords a narrower pipe about two feet long, a small round mouthpiece jutting from the back of it at the lower end. It had the conscious irregularity of hand-made things, so that there could never be an exact duplicate. It varied somewhat in thickness from end to end, and was a little bowed and twisted; when Alda lifted it and set the mouthpiece to his lips the double pipe, projecting some fifteen inches above his head, curved very slightly over his left shoulder. He held it with his left hand at waist level, and fingered below at the full stretch of his right arm; and round the finger- holes carved and painted mountain boys circled, dancing.

A gust of breathy, rustling notes came cascading out of the pipe, twining and shaking downwards in an improvised flourish, to settle deeply and sonorously into a slow, plaintive tune. It was hardly louder here, but for the reverberations from the walls, than when they had heard it descending from the hills beyond the col, through a couple of miles of mountain air.

“This is my rifle,” said Alda, taking his lips from the mouthpiece and turning the pipe gently in his hands. “We call it the fujara—not very portable, and a little ponderous to play, because of all the over-blowing, but the queen of the pipes, all the same. The nearest thing to a gun I’ve ever possessed, or am ever likely to. Did you never hear it, down in the valley?”

“We heard it, yes.” Dominic stretched out his hand and took the pipe, fascinated. The wood was silken smooth under his fingers. The little bandits, axes brandished above their heads, leaped like deer, legs doubled under them. “But we didn’t know what it looked like, we’d never seen one. How could we guess?” He fitted his fingers to the holes, and held the instrument against him; and it hung lightly enough, for all its bulk. “What did you call it? A fujara? It’s beautifully made.”

“My great-grandfather made it. For a fujara it’s on the small side, most of them run close to two metres.” He laid it back carefully in its corner, cushioned by the folds of the heavy cloak.

“So it was you,” said Dominic. “I wasn’t imagining things, you did play ‘Bushes and Briars’.”

“Very probably. Was that what brought you up here after me?”

“Partly that. A musician who lived somewhere in these hills and knew English songs seemed a fair bet for Karol Alda. And by then I’d begun to think that maybe the whole business wasn’t quite so obvious as it seemed, even before I knew your side of the story. I know now that you hadn’t got anything to fear, or anything to hide, so why should you want to kill Welland? But you see, somebody else has got something to hide, somebody else is afraid. And I don’t think we were wrong about what he’s afraid of. He’s killed once to keep your case from being dug up again and re-examined, and he may kill again for the same reason.”

“Terrell’s death was not murder,” said Alda, considering him thoughtfully.

“No, I accept that. But it started Welland off on the same trail, and Welland’s death was murder. And now that we know where you stand, and there isn’t anything treasonable about co-operating, there’s nothing to prevent Tossa and me from telling the whole truth. Will you come down to Pavol with me, and tell your part of it, too? Between us all, we ought to be able to clear up this case, and get Tossa out of trouble.”

“I’m ready,” said Alda. “We can go whenever you like.”

Dominic was the first to set foot outside the open doorway, on the sunlit stone under the deep overhang.

There was a sharp, small crack. Something sheered into the weathered wall just in front of his face, and flying splinters stung his cheek. He clapped a startled hand to the place, and brought a smear of blood away on his fingers. And in the same instant Alda flung an arm about him and hoisted him bodily back into the hut in one heave, slamming the door to between them and the second bullet, as it thudded into the thick timbers where a split second before Dominic had been standing.

“I brought him here,” said Dominic huskily, coming out of his moment of sickening shock with quickened senses. He wiped at his stinging cheek with the back of his hand, and stared almost disbelievingly at the minute smears of blood that resulted. “I got you to come down out of your clouds to help me, and now look what I’ve done! Led him straight to you.”

“You don’t know that. Does it matter, anyhow?” Alda drew breath cautiously, and looked the boy over in the warm wood-darkness within the closed door. All the lines of his face had sharpened and brightened, in what might have been merely tension, but looked strangely like pleasurable anticipation. He slid past Dominic to the small, single-paned window that let in light on this side of the hut.

“I do know. If he’d known exactly where to find you, he’d have come for you in the first place. It’s you he wants suppressed. But he did know where I was, to a bit. All I’ve done is fetch you out of cover for him.”

“No, you’ve done something much more useful, brought him out of cover. And if he was following you, why didn’t he pick us both off while we were out on the talus?”

Dominic’s mind was groping its way with increasing certainty through shadowy places. “He couldn’t have been following me, not closely. But he knew where I’d gone. I think… I think he was betting on picking me up on the way