“Oh, I thought—I hoped that—father?” This last in piteous appeal.
The man in the cloak scowled savagely and shoved her aside, while he and his men pushed Ned into a large, sumptuously furnished room.
“I know what you thought well enough,” he growled. “You thought that Racoszky, that scoundrelly husband of yours, had come and tried to see you secretly. That’s what you thought! Well, you are a fool and, though I’m ashamed to say it, a daughter of mine at the same time. Look at him as much as you want, Marya! You see that this doesn’t happen to be your husband. Instead, he is a rascally fellow who—you can go now, men!” The servitors went out silently. “Instead of that, he is a fellow who has been dogging my footsteps for the last hour or so and whom I trapped at the foot of the stairs there just to find out who he was and why he has followed me in this way.”
Ned did not quail before the menace in his captor’s eye. Instead it is to be doubted if he even had heard his last words. One poignant thought was ringing through his head:
Marya? The man in the cloak whom he knew to be a conspirator was her father and he had called her the wife of Lieutenant Racoszky.
Then this would-be assassin was none other than old Count Polnychek of Budapest!
CHAPTER XXV
THE BOYS GET WORRIED OVER NED
It was about half-past eleven when Alan, nervously pacing the outside runways of the Ocean Flyer there on the Prater, heard Buck Stewart’s welcome voice greet him cheerily from the darkness.
“Are the others back here yet?” asked the reporter.