I put my mouth as close to the hole as possible, “Helena!” I said.
“Yes, Marshall,” she answered. “I have seen how hopeless it is, and it’s quite all right. The important thing is for one of you to get out. If you could stab the guard when he brings the tray—”
“So that’s the sort of thing the Balkans have taught a lady from Boston?” I asked. “Suppose your grandmother Collins could hear you now? Anyway, we’d have to stab two of them at the door of this room, and no one knows how many more before the way out of this nest was clear. No, that may have been all right in the eighteenth century, but I’m afraid we shouldn’t get away with it.” Then I told her about the loosened board and the acid. “If you could tell us how to get to Herrovosca without a car after we leave this place—” I finished.
“I can’t,” she said, “I’ve only the most hazy idea where we may be.”
“South or southwest of the place where we were captured.”
“I did not know even that,” she said. “We must be somewhere near the Visichich’s manor. We’re not in it. The country there is hilly, but not rocky and bare like the cliff out of that window. No, we’re still in the mountains. I think,” she went on, “if we only knew just where we are, and how to get here, we should hold the key to the control of Alaria—if we had some loyal troops.”
“I fear,” I said, “that two ‘ifs’ make a negative.”
“If that’s supposed to be funny,” she said, “I think it’s ill-timed.”
“It wasn’t,” I assured her, solemnly. “I was only trying to point out that this man’s secrecy is strength for him but not strength for anyone trying to undermine him. I just don’t believe that the people who believe in the supernatural Black Ghost would listen even if he were unmasked before them. They would merely say that the man who was unmasked was an impostor, and the Black Ghost would go right on.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said, cryptically, “these legends have endured for eight hundred years, and now a living man has conceived the idea of impersonating them, and making political capital out of the impersonation.”