"You lead us thither," intervened Rákóczy, at the same time pressing a ducat into the man's fist.
He looked at it, turned it round in his palm and gave it back to Rákóczy with the request that he would give him copper money in exchange for it. He could not imagine anyone giving him gold which was not false.
When this had been done he neatly led the gentlemen through the morass—wading in front of them, girded up to his waist—through those hidden places where the water-fowl were sitting on their nests, and when at last they emerged from among the thick reedy plantations they saw a hundred paces in front of them a fire of heaped up bulrushes brightly burning, by the light of which they saw a horseman standing behind it.
Here their guide stopped and the three men trotted in single file towards the fire, which suddenly died out at the very moment they were approaching it, as if someone had cast wet rushes upon it.
Topay greeted the horseman, who lifted his hat in silence and allowed them to draw nearer.
"There are three of you gentlemen together," he observed guardedly; "but that doesn't matter," he continued. "It would be all the same to me if there were ten times as many of you, for there's a pistol in every one of my holsters, from which I can fire sixteen bullets in succession, and in each bullet is a magnet, so that even if I don't aim at my man I bring him down all the same."
"Very good, very good indeed, Master Kökényesdi," said Topay; "we have not come here for you to pepper us with your magnetic globules, but we have come to ask your assistance for the accomplishment of a doughty deed, the object of which is an attack upon our pagan foes."
"Oh, my good sirs, I am ready to do that without the co-operation of your honours. In the courtyard of a castle in the Baborsai puszta there is a well some hundred fathoms deep and quite full of Turkish skulls, and I will not be satisfied till I have piled up on the top of it a tower just as high made of similar materials."
"So I believe. But you would gain glory too?"
"I have glory enough already. I am known in foreign countries as well as at home. The King of France has long ago only waited for a word from me to make me chief colonel of a long-tailed regiment, and quite recently, when the King of England heard how I bored through the hulls of the munition ships on the Theiss, he did me the honour to invite me to form a regiment of divers to ravage the enemy under water. And I've all the boys for it too."