Salisky leaned toward the boy, and said:
“The truth of it is, if you do not already know it, that your next move is not of our choosing. Your assignment to Warsaw has been cancelled, and your custody, if it might be called that, has been transferred to another center of operation.”
“The result of a long reach,” supplemented Henri.
“Just so,” concluded Salisky. “Good-bye, my young friends; luck be it that some day we may meet again.”
The speaker turned away without another word, and Marovitch was equally brief in his farewell. Both of the scouts, strange to state, were seized with a joint spell of coughing as they passed out.
“Now, let’s have a bit of a confab all by ourselves,” invited Billy, “before the nurse fires you. Tell me what happened after I took the count in front of those black space-killers?”
“When you started that circus act on the horse’s back,” narrated Henri, “I was hanging on by my eyebrows. Then I managed to get a leg inside the sleigh and had rolled over on the pile of robes; then a sudden stop as the sleigh bumped into the fallen horses—so sudden that my head cracked the dashboard. You sure found the combination in the nick of time, with an open drawbridge less than twenty yards ahead. While about a dozen men were sitting on the heads of those flopping beasts, who should come galloping up on a big gray horse but the little girl’s father, and they had a time together, for a minute or two, I tell you. When we picked you up, limp and bleeding, I prayed like a good fellow that you would open your eyes and say ‘All right, pard.’ The prince, duke, or count, I didn’t know which, had you in a carriage in a brace of shakes, and you have been here ever since, with me hanging around like a lost soul.”
“Where was the driver of the runaways all this time? How did they get away from him?”
Billy was a stickler for details.
“Oh,” continued Henri, “all I know about that is hearsay; the rig was in front of a palace up the way, the little one waiting for her father to come out. The moujik, or driver, was standing at the horses’ heads when a passing auto blew up a tire. The fellow in front of the wild ones that you pulled down counted for as much as a piece of paper string. They left him in the road. That’s how we got into it. There’s one thing more, Buddy, believe me—those Sergius horses are not city broke; they’re too nervous for even a joy ride.”