I enlarged on this, speaking in latent sarcasm which, needless to say, was absolutely lost upon my visitors. Perhaps it was best for my personal safety that it was so. Their highly-educated super-kultur would prevent them from appreciating such, or understanding it. I said that any combat in which a preponderance of advantage rested on one side or the other could not be tolerated by any honourable gentleman, who never minded accepting odds, providing these odds were against himself. But he would consider it low and mean and altogether unworthy to take advantage of an opponent unless equality and fair play could be ensured. For my part I insisted that those whom they represented should have full opportunities of equal combat; in other words, that they should have time to get sober.
These honeyed sentiments clinched the business. My visitors bowed most politely and replied, "Having heard your explanations, we fully realise, as gentlemen speaking for and acting on behalf of gentlemen" (God save the mark!) "that we cannot do otherwise than accept your reasons and act accordingly." Thus they agreed to fix the meeting by mutual consent for eleven the following morning, and with an exchange of courtesies on all sides we parted company.
* * * * * *
According to the local railway time-tables, a slow train was advertised as departing south for Hamburg at the early hour of 4 a.m. or a little after; whilst a fast train, running between Hamburg and the north of Denmark, stopped a few minutes at Neumunster about 7 a.m. Neumunster is the junction station for the Kiel Canal on the main Hamburg, Altona, Rensburg, Schleswig, Flensburg, Wogens, Vamdrup, Kolding line, and connecting up Fredericia and Copenhagen by the boat train via Esbjerg.
* * * * * *
At 3.30 a.m., long before the hour of dawn, a silent shadow glided along the deserted streets of Kiel. A meek voice at the palatial railway-station in very guttural German requested a third-class ticket by the slow train to Hamburg. This modest traveller left the train at Neumunster, but no one appeared to notice he had broken his journey, or that he quietly disappeared from view on the station platform until the fast northward-bound train bustled in. In fact, he was so muffled up, and he gripped his handbag so tightly, that he did not appear to be worth ten pfennig in return for any railway official's attention; whilst other travellers were far too occupied by their own concerns to trouble about his existence.
* * * * * *
When the world had indeed become properly aired and the morning sun had risen far above the housetops, the landlord of a certain hotel in Kiel might have been seen standing at the entrance of his hostelry. A self-satisfied smile suffused his fat face, and both his hands were dived well down into capacious trouser-pockets, wherein he kept turning over coin after coin, whilst he puzzled his slow-working brains in vain to find a solution to account for the mad eccentricities of all foreigners in general; in particular those lunatics who seemed to prefer night-travelling on any uncomfortable train to snug, warm beds; and who left notes of unintelligible explanation, enclosing double the remuneration necessary for the so-called luxuries supplied by his hotel.
* * * * * *
About the same time a lattice window in an upper storey of the same hotel was thrown open, and a sweet-faced maiden, having an Hungarian type of beauty, leaned out upon the window-sill, permitting the full rays of the morning sun to light up the beauties of her face, form, and figure. She was reading a letter which she had found pushed under her bedroom door whilst she had wandered in dreamland through the fairy glades of fancy during her innocent girlish repose. She frowned as she read it and stamped her foot in disappointment at the postscript, muttering the while to herself: