“You have slipped a cog somewhere, I do not know just where yet, but it will come to me,” Jurka said. “You have been following the girl for a month and you tell me you do not know where the jewels are. Where were you last night when she left the house wearing them?”
“I had watched all day,” Steccho told him excitedly. “I was in Vorga’s tobacco store on the corner in the afternoon. You can see the entrance from his window. She could not have passed out without my having seen her.”
“You lie! You were with Dmitri Kavec. He is a known spy of the Internationals. Did you meet him in Sofia?”
Steccho closed his lips stubbornly. Dmitri was his friend. The car sped through a curving roadway round the base of a rocky precipice surmounted by an old blockhouse. In the darkness the locality lost all semblance of city scenery and might have been in the mountain fastnesses of Bulgaria. Jurka leaned forward with careless interest, and took note of their surroundings. “It is like the road to Monastir,” he said, half to himself. Steccho’s eyes stared at him through the gloom of the car’s interior like those of some wild animal held in leash. His mother had named it “The Trail of Tears,” that road from Monastir, where the weak and young had fled in the great retreat, and had been trampled to death, or had lingered for the slower fate from starvation. He himself had seen the babies, the young girls, the old people—and the memory was a veritable glut of butchery. Yet this Count smiled as he mentioned it as though it had been some tryst with pleasure which he had kept along that road from Monastir. And while the boy’s thoughts leaped from one avenging plan to another, the Count continued:
“I think you lie, Steccho. Perhaps you have lied to me from the beginning. Perhaps, like Dmitri, you are a Czech spy. Do you know why he is here in America?”
“I know nothing about him,” Steccho asserted, with a touch of bravado. “We were friends in Sofia. Both students at the University. I did not even know he was a spy. I had hoped he could give me news of my people.”
Jurka touched the bell and the car stopped short under the overhanging shadow of autumn foliage, and as the faint light from an arc lamp up the road reached the interior, Steccho saw the round bore of a revolver facing him, held steadily and easily in Jurka’s hand as it rested on his knee.
“I could kill you now and have your body thrown in the bushes yonder. It would be one way out. When I saved your life you gave in return certain assurances of faithful service.”
“Ah, but you promised me you would provide safety for my mother and sister,” Steccho broke in eagerly. “You hear from them, yes? I hear they have killed all the girls two years ago, cut their throats, thrown their bodies in wells, that they took them up to the mountains for the soldiers. Was Maryna among those, excellenza?”
“I have given you my word for her safety,” responded Jurka. “The war is past. You brood too much over fancied terrors. Listen to reality. This is what you may fear. If you do not procure the jewels from this girl to-night, I will have your throat wrung for you like a dead fowl. We save bullets for men, not cowards.”