I looked round me in all directions. The woodland road by which I had reached the frontier stretched away on the other side of the fence. This was in itself a suspicious sign. It scarcely seemed likely that two independent drives would have been constructed so as to meet in the heart of the forest, unless there was some traffic meant to pass that way. All at once the explanation burst upon me. It was a smuggler’s route!
The high tariffs of the Russian and Austrian empires have fostered an important contraband traffic. The soldiers who patrol the frontier are easily bribed by a share in the gains of the smugglers. What the Russian War Office had done was to bribe the smugglers in their turn to act as its allies in this strange invasion.
I have used the word invasion. Unless my deductions were wholly false, the thirty-six guns which I had seen passing my window in the night were by this time actually planted on the soil of Austria.
I sprang over the fence, and hurried forward on the still clearly revealed track.
At the end of an hour from my first entrance into the forest, my ear caught a low murmur which warned me that I was drawing near to some kind of encampment. Striking from the lane into the wood, I advanced, creeping from tree to tree. But I have had few opportunities of learning woodcraft, and there were keener ears, and more stealthy footsteps than mine in the forest. Suddenly I felt a powerful hand gripping my throat, a dark cloth descended over my eyes, and I was thrown violently to the ground.
I did not lose consciousness, while I was lifted up by the feet and shoulders, and carried a distance which I calculated at two hundred paces. After some twisting and turning I was set down, and the cloth was taken off my head. I sat up and looked round.
I found myself in a small hut or wigwam of boughs and woven rushes, surrounded by half a dozen dark-faced men who squatted between me and the doorway, the only opening by which light was admitted. One glance at my captors satisfied me that they were neither soldiers nor Russians. Reassured on this point I prepared to defend myself boldly.
The head man of the party appeared to be an old fellow with a short grey beard, who might have passed equally well in the uncertain light for a Wallach, a Slovene, a gipsy, or a Jew, but certainly not for an honest man of any race. Addressing myself to the chief of the smugglers, as I conceived him to be, in Polish, I asked—
‘Why have you dared to treat me like this?’
‘He is a Pole!’ The muttered exclamation solved my doubt as to the race of the smugglers. The language they used between themselves was Romany.