In the meantime I heard from Father Michel that he had been successful in arranging all the difficulties in connection with the affair at the camp. The Austrian official had exaggerated matters to me that night in declaring there were dying men there. No one had died; and the injured men had first been so frightened with the threat of prosecution for their part in the abduction that the money I had left for them had been accepted with very grateful surprise.
Captain Hanske had very naturally resented his rough handling, and, breathing many threats of what his government would do, had forwarded a very furious report to Vienna.
His superior was dining with me the day after the report was received, and had done himself very well indeed when he referred to the matter.
“You know a priest named Father Michel in Poabja, an out-of-the-way hole in Bosnia, don’t you, Mr. Bergwyn?” he said with a very suggestive smile.
I affected to think. “Poabja? Poabja? Whereabouts is it?”
“A few miles from Samac—the point on the frontier where the line ends; and where one might at a pinch get a special train; if for instance one was in a hurry to leave the district.”
He intended me to know by that, of course, that my movements had been traced.
“I think I had a friend who once went there,” I replied.
“This may be about him;” and he pulled out the report and gave it me and took another cigar and a fresh drink, as I glanced through the paper. It was a duly garbled official misdescription of what had occurred that night and represented the captain as having fought valiantly against great odds until he had been overpowered.
“He seems to be a valiant fellow, this agent of yours,” I said. “And this—how is he called? Burgwan, is it?—must be a desperate character?”