CHAPTER XIX. KOWNO.
Distinct with footprints yet
Of many a mighty marcher gone that way.
There are many who overlook the fact that in Northern lands, more especially in such plains as Lithuania, Courland, and Poland, travel in winter is easier than at any other time of year. The rivers, which run sluggishly in their ditch-like beds, are frozen so completely that the bridges are no longer required. The roads, in summer almost impassable—mere ruts across the plain—are for the time ignored, and the traveller strikes a bee-line from place to place across a level of frozen snow.
Louis d'Arragon had worked out a route across the plain, as he had been taught to shape a course across a chart.
“How did you return from Kowno?” he asked Barlasch.
“Name of my own nose,” replied that traveller. “I followed the line of dead horses.”
“Then I will take you by another route,” replied the sailor.
And three days later—before General Rapp had made his entry into Dantzig—Barlasch sold two skeletons of horses and a sleigh at an enormous profit to a staff officer of Murat's at Gumbinnen.
They had passed through Rapp's army. They had halted at Konigsberg to make inquiry, and now, almost in sight of the Niemen, where the land begins to heave in great waves, like those that roll round Cape Horn, they were asking still if any man had seen Charles Darragon.
“Where are you going, comrades?” a hundred men had paused to ask them.