She nodded and settled a little farther back into the shadow.
“The people were well treated,” continued the baron. “They lived better than they had ever lived; they saved money and sent it home that their families might join them. But beyond everything, they piled up a great, an enormous fortune for the man who had discovered the mountain. And his wife soon forgot that she had at one time worked in a restaurant.”
“Ah, yes,” murmured the countess, with a strange smile; “and her children never knew it!”
“Perhaps so,” agreed the baron, searching her face with his keen eyes. “I do not know. But at last we began to suspect that we had been wrong to permit so many of our young men to go to America to work for this man of copper, though we had been glad enough at the time, since we had no work for them at home. But they were always writing back about America, about how well things were there—about liberty! Some of them came back from time to time and talked too much and too wildly. The climax which we should have foreseen came at last. A bomb was thrown at the king.”
The baron paused as though to contemplate—to say a prayer before—an act so terrible, so sacrilegious.
“Continue, my friend,” encouraged the countess. “I find this history immensely entertaining.”
“No doubt you already know most of it,” suggested the baron.
“Even if I do, it gains new interest from your manner of telling. Please go on.”
“As for the rest, I will be brief. We found that that bomb had been thrown by a man who had come back from America expressly for that purpose. He said so, quite frankly. He told us that another would succeed where he had failed—that our country was to be made a republic like America. We laughed and hanged him—but it gave us to think. So we sent agents to America. They unearthed for us the history which I have just recounted, and they found it was indeed true that over there they were plotting against us. Their leader—the man who ruled them, who organized them, who collected their money, who furnished all the brains—was a radical, an anarchist, who, fifteen years before, had been forced to flee from Goritza for his life.”
“And who is now the president of the new republic,” broke in the countess. “In a word, Jeneski.”