I was well served by my agents, and inside the week I knew far too much to let me dream of trusting a nickel to the Servian exchequer, but quite enough to enable me to go to Belgrade and play the part of a representative of a group of American capitalists with amiable financial intentions.
I knew other things, too. Secrets, many of them, about intrigues that were in progress against the Servian rule and government. And a nice mess of unhealthy pottage they made. One thing I had been particularly urgent to discover—the character of Prince Albrevics. It was anything but cleanly. He was one of those men who learn the commandments pretty thoroughly by breaking every one of them consistently, and then sigh in blase regret that, as there are only ten of them, they have to stoop to repetition in order to live comfortably.
My money began to talk that same evening in Samac.
Soon after Gatrina had started on her journey, I surprised the depot folk at Samac with a request for a special train. I looked a pretty object to travel special, no doubt; and at first they laughed and were for hustling me out of the place as a lunatic. But I soon had them hustling with a very different purpose. Money did it. And inside of five minutes the station master himself, a lean hungry looking Austrian, had put himself absolutely at my disposal and was working all he knew to figure out the best means of getting me through to Vienna.
I said I would start in an hour and a half, and having sent a wire in cypher to my agent in Vienna to help matters on at that end, I went to Karasch, and with him rode back to Poabja to get the priest’s help in straightening things out in the matter of that Austrian officer.
He did not give me a very pleasant reception.
“You have been to Samac?” he asked.
“I have just come from there.”
“Then why do you come to me?” he asked with cold austerity.
“Not to say I’m sorry for having gone there, but to get you to render me a service.”