"The Duke Miridoff is a double-eyed traitor!" he declared. "For German gold he would barter his country's opportunity to regain her lost provinces. I have a long score to settle with Miridoff. He has shown bitter animosity to the people of the hills. Three of my men were hanged at Serajoz ten months ago for a raid that his exactions had provoked. But now the day of reckoning has come! How is it your proverb goes?—This is the last straw that causes the worm to turn!"
The lust of conflict and the primitive craving for revenge showed in every line of the gigantic chief. The veneer of civilisation sloughed off. His eyes flashed, his nostrils dilated, and as he stood up his mighty arms swung menacingly like heavy flails.
"By to-night I can have three thousand of my men before the gates of Kirkalisse!" he declared.
CHAPTER XV
THE TRUMP CARD
The sun crept behind a distant mountain peak. In this country of little twilight the transition from day into night was speedy, and almost as Olga watched from her window the last rays seemed to vanish; symbol to her of the vanishing of hope and the encroachment of she knew not what.
She reflected, as she sat there by the window, on the events of the night before. Following her capture by a band of brigands, she had been convoyed through the hill country by a trail almost as difficult as that which Fenton and Crane had followed. They had arrived in the dense darkness of night at an old building perched on the crest of one of the highest peaks—apparently a disused hunting lodge. The fears of the princess, which had increased with each hour spent on the trail, were somewhat allayed when she found there were a couple of maids in the lodge. But while that was comforting in one respect, the fact that they evidently knew and respected her rank proved to her that it was no band of mountain marauders who had carried her off. The girls were not gipsies. Her first thought that she would be held for a ransom was replaced by a feeling of vague uncertainty.
The lodge had not been used for some time, although several of the rooms had been hastily furnished; furnished too with a certain degree of elegance. This was an added circumstance which provided the princess with scope for uneasy speculation as to her present position and the likely developments of the future. In a vague way she began to realise the motive behind her abduction.
Any doubts that may have lingered had vanished at noon that day with the arrival of a young woman who rode up a wide path around the mountain side from the opposite direction to that along which the princess had been brought. The new-comer was received with every evidence of respect by the two dusky brigands who guarded the lodge. Watching from the window of a room on the ground floor, which had been appropriated to her as a bedroom, Olga had felt a sudden stirring of resentment when she recognised in the fair stranger the woman to whom Fenton had been so attentive—the woman, moreover, who had involved him in a restaurant brawl and for whose sake he had been prepared to fight a duel. If Olga were still ignorant of the real nature and the depth of her interest in the Canadian, she must surely have been astonished at the jealous promptings which took possession of her as she surreptitiously regarded the dancer through the broken shutter which rattled in the wind outside her window. The new-comer undeniably was attractive.
The interview which followed between them had left the princess in a state of mental puzzlement and doubt. Mademoiselle Petrowa had told her a most surprising story, speaking in French for the benefit of possible eavesdroppers; a story of plots and counter-plots in which the narrator herself appeared in a double role, ostensibly an agent of Miridoff, actually a member of the Russian Secret Service. The story seemed highly improbable, and yet there was much to substantiate it—the presence of the dancer in Varden's library and her claim to having been on hand when the attempt was made to assassinate Prince Peter. And in addition there had been something about the little dancer, an air of sincerity, that had done much to impress the princess with the truth of her story.