Again the wind went sweeping through the branches and one clear high voice of the night seemed to say "Behold, I am the way. Follow thou me." The wind it must have been, but how was it to help me? Then hope returned for I knew it was a west wind. The trail I longed to follow had never altered from its western course. The wind came from the same direction. There was the solution. If I followed the course of the wind, if I kept it always in my face, I would be able to hold to the trail even in the dark. I shouted aloud for joy at the discovery.
But my progress was distressingly slow. As I went on and on, it became so dark that I was forced to come down to a cautious walk, swinging my boar spear before me, like a blind man on a crowded thoroughfare, to keep from walking into the trunks of the silent trees.
Often through the night I lay down to rest and once I slept, but each time I took the trail I held my moistened finger to the breeze to get my bearings. During one of these enforced rests I built a small fire of dried leaves and ignited a torch of pine wood to help me on my way. After a little searching by means of its feeble light, I made out the fresh marks of the trail on the ground and knew that the west wind held to its course. My tread was as silent as the animals that glared at my camp-fire. I frightened them away with a shower of burning embers. My head ached and my limbs became heavy with a weariness that caused me to rest longer each time I halted.
Once I struck a match and found that it was only eleven o'clock. I had been vainly hoping for daylight and the time went so slowly. How far I had gone I had no means of knowing. But, shortly after I looked at my watch, the moon, great and round and white, came up and shed its soft light through the trees. The sight of it brought me up with a shiver.
The moon was in front of me!
A moon rising in the west I knew was an impossibility! If this were the moon, then by all the laws of nature I must now be facing the east. The east! Was it possible that I had been following the wrong trail? Had the wind, while I blindly yielded to its invisible touch, been veering gently to the south and finally to the east? In that case I had been walking in a half circle and must now be somewhere near my starting point. All my weary walking had gone for nothing. Solonika and Marbosa's men were as far away as ever.
My despair overcame me and my knees gave way beneath me. I sank gently to the ground with a half articulate moan, like a drowning swimmer who feels his strength deserting him.
What was that I heard? Was my mind leaving me under the fearful strain? Surely that sound was not the sound of voices? I listened distraught. There it was again, and this time there was no mistaking it. Close beside me somewhere men were talking and laughing! Then high above all I distinguished one voice singing. And I knew that voice. It acted upon my tired body like the electric waves from a galvanic battery. There could be no mistake. Through the Forest of Zin, mingling with the tinkle of a piano, came the voice of Solonika singing the words of Mohacs' Field.
"Volt nekem egy daru szoru paripam,
De el adta a szegedi kapitany;
Ott sem voltam az aldo mas i vas nal;
No, de sa baj, tobb is veszett Mohacsnal!"
I listened spellbound to the entire verse and heard at the end a chorus of fifty or more male voices join boisterously in the refrain; "No, de sa baj, tobb is veszett Mohacsnal!"