"A hundred kroner—it is a large sum——"
"Yours—if you do what I ask——" And he thrust the note into the old man's fingers.
This bound the bargain.
CHAPTER XXIII
SCHLOSS SZOLNOK
The night and day which followed the terrible events in the house of the Beg of Rataj were like an evil dream to Marishka Strahni. She slept, she awoke, always to be hurried on by her relentless captors, too ill to offer resistance or any effort to delay them. Hugh Renwick was dead. All the other direful assurances as to her own fate were as nothing beside that dreadful fact. And Goritz—the man who sat beside her—Hugh's murderer! Fear—loathing—she seemed even too weak and ill for these, lying for the first part of their long journey, inert and helpless. The man beside her watched her furtively from time to time, venturing attention and solicitude for her comfort, but she did not reply to his questions or even look at him. At the house of Selim Ali she recovered some of her strength, and again upon the following night, at a small inn not far from the Serbian border, she fell into a deep sleep of exhaustion, from which she was aroused with difficulty. The machine was stopped frequently, and its occupants were questioned, but in each case Captain Goritz produced papers from his pocket, which let them pass. They were now well within the borders of Hungary, and as the girl grew stronger, courage came, and with it the thought of escape. But in spite of her apparent helplessness she was aware that her captors were watching her carefully, permitting no conversation with anyone, locking the doors of the rooms in which she slept, at the houses where they stopped, and taking turns at keeping guard outside. But their very precautions gave her an appreciation of the risks that they ran. She was a prisoner in her own country. All those she passed upon the road were her friends. She had only to make her identity known, and the object of her captors, to gain her freedom. She was somewhere in eastern Hungary, but just where she did not know. The chauffeur spoke the language fluently, and Marishka's ignorance of it made her task more difficult. But one night at an inn in a small village, she found a girl who spoke German, and in a moment when the attention of her guards was relaxed, she managed to make the girl understand, promising her a sum of money if she would summon the police of the town, to whom Marishka would tell her story. The girl agreed, and in the early morning just as the machine came around to the door Goritz found himself confronted by two men in uniform.
Marishka, who had been waiting, trembling, in her room above, came running down the stairs and threw herself upon their mercy, telling her story and begging their intercession.
But even as she spoke she realized that the very wildness of her narrative was against its verity in the minds of these rustic policemen.
"It is an extraordinary tale," said the elder man, "and one which of course must be investigated—an abduction!"