"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "Why not? I'll risk it. After all's said and done a thundering lot of downright cool cheek often pays when you're in a tight corner. It would be a rattling good joke to be taken in an Austrian train to a convenient station near the frontier. Yes, dash it all! I'll try a second Kopenick hoax."
CHAPTER XXIX
A SURPRISE
HAVING refreshed, the fugitive gathered together a few portable articles that had belonged to the deceased Baron Eitel von Stopelfeld, including the portmanteau. Luggage, he decided, must be suffered in spite of the inconvenience of carrying it in the snowstorm; the major's sword, too, for experience had taught him that no swashbuckling, sabre-rattling Prussian officer goes far without that emblem of authority except when he is a prisoner of war.
It was a difficult task to regain the road, hampered as he was with his recently acquired possessions, but at length the pseudo baron achieved that part of the business. Viewed from the unfenced mountain pass the derelict motorcar was, as he had expected, almost hidden by a mantle of white.
Fortunately the wayfarer had the wind at his back, but even then his progress was laboriously slow. Never less than ankle-deep, often thigh-deep, the snow was rapidly increasing, until more than once the Englishman debated whether he should seek shelter until the storm abated.
"Might be days before it does," he mused, "and it's no joke being caught out in the mountains. At the first village I strike I'll have to pitch in a yarn how I, Major Baron Eitel von Stopelfeld, chance to be servantless and forced to carry my own luggage."
On and on he trudged, sternly resisting the tempting desire to rest. He knew the danger of halting in the snow when in a semi-torpid state and falling into a sleep that knows no wakening in this world. He was grateful, too, for the warmth of the great-coat, realising that his previously ragged garb would have been totally inadequate against the intense cold. For the next five kilometres the road was of a give-and-take order—rugged, undulating, and fully exposed to the now boisterous wind that howled down the pass; then, on rounding a right-angled bend the gradient was steeply on the downward path. Three thousand feet below lay one of the fairest of the Bohemian valleys, its verdant fields and the tops of graceful trees of the pine woods bathed in brilliant sunshine.
Not until he was below the snow-line did the traveller halt, partake sparingly of food and drink, and then set out boldly towards a wooden hamlet that nestled around a small church with a lofty, slender spire.