Early, ere the dawn, the strangers at the Hortobágy inn started on their way.
This inn, though only a "csárda," or wayside house of call, was no owl-haunted, tumble-down, reed-thatched place, such as the painter had imagined, but a respectable brick building, with a shingle roof, comfortable rooms, and a capital kitchen and cellar quite worthy of any town. Below the flower garden, the Hortobágy river wound silently along, between banks fringed with reeds and willows. Not far from the inn, the high road crossed it on a substantial stone bridge of nine arches. Debreczin folk maintain that the solidity of this bridge is due to the masons having used milk to slake their lime; jealous people say that they employed wine made from Hortobágy grapes, and that this drew it together.
The object of the early start was æsthetic as well as practical. The painter looked forward to seeing a sunrise on the puszta, a sight which no one, who has not viewed it with his own eyes, can form the slightest idea of. The practical reason was that the cattle to be sold could only be separated from the herd in the early morning. In spring, most of them have little calves, and at dawn, when these are not sucking, the herdsmen going in among the herd, catch those whose mothers have been selected and take them away. The mothers then follow of their own accord. A stranger would be gored to death by these wild creatures, who have never seen anyone but their own drovers, but to them they are quite accustomed.
So the strangers set off for those wild parts of the plain, where even the puszta dwellers need a guide, in a couple of light carriages. The two coachmen, however, knew the district, and needed no pilot. They therefore left the cowboy, who had been sent as guide, to amuse himself at the inn, he promising to overtake them before they reached the herd.
The artist was a famous landscape painter from Vienna, who often came to Hungary for the sake of his work, and who spoke the tongue of the people. The other Viennese was manager of the stables to the Moravian landowner, Count Engelshort. It would, perhaps, have been wiser to have sent some farmer who knew about cattle, for a lover of horses has little mind left for anything else. But he had this advantage over the rest of the staff, that he knew Hungarian, for when a lieutenant of Dragoons he had long been stationed in Hungary, where the fair ladies had taught him to speak it. Two of the Count's drovers had been told off to escort him—strong, sturdy fellows, each armed with a revolver. As for the gentlemen from Debreczin, one was the chief constable, the other the worthy citizen from whose herd the twenty-four stock cows and their bull were to be selected.
Now, at the time of starting, the waning moon and the brightest of the stars were still visible, while over in the east dawn was already breaking.
The townsman, a typical Magyar, explained to the painter how the star above them was called "the wanderer's lamp," and how the "poor lads," or "betyárs," looking up at it, would sigh, "God help us," and so escape detection when stealing cattle. This quite enchanted the painter.
"What a Shakespearian idea," he said.
He grew more and more impressed with the endless vision of puszta, when, an hour later, their galloping steeds brought them where nothing could be seen save sky above and grass below, where there was not a bird or frog-eating stork to relieve the marvellous monotony.
"What tones! What tints! What harmony in the contrasts!"