Title:      The House of the Four Winds (1935)
Author:     John Buchan
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The House of the Four Winds (1935)
Author:     John Buchan





The earlier doings of some of the personages in this tale will be
found recorded in Huntingtower and Castle Gay.

J. B.




CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

I.  THE MAN WITH THE ELEPHANT

II.  THE HOUSE OF THE FOUR WINDS

III.  DIVERSIONS OF A MARIONETTE

IV.  DIFFICULTIES OF A REVOLUTIONARY

V.  SURPRISING ENERGY OF A CONVALESCENT

VI.  ARRIVALS AT AN INN

VII.  "SI VIEILLESSE POUVAIT"

VIII.  SPLENDIDE MENDAX

IX.  NIGHT IN THE WOODS

X.  AURUNCULEIA

XI.  THE BLOOD-RED ROOK

XII.  THE STREET OF THE WHITE PEACOCK

XIII.  THE MARCH ON MELINA

ENVOI




PROLOGUE


Great events, says the philosophic historian, spring only from
great causes, though the immediate occasion may be small; but I
think his law must have exceptions.  Of the not inconsiderable
events which I am about to chronicle, the occasion was trivial, and
I find it hard to detect the majestic agency behind them.  What
world-force, for example, ordained that Mr Dickson McCunn should
slip into the Tod's Hole in his little salmon-river on a bleak
night in April; and, without changing his clothes, should
thereafter make a tour of inspection of his young lambs?  His
action was the proximate cause of this tale, but I can see no
profounder explanation of it than the inherent perversity of man.

The performance had immediate consequences for Mr McCunn.  He awoke
next morning with a stiff neck, an aching left shoulder, and a pain
in the small of his back--he who never in his life before had had a
touch of rheumatism.  A vigorous rubbing with embrocation failed to
relieve him, and, since he was accustomed to robust health, he
found it intolerable to hobble about with a thing like a toothache
in several parts of his body.  Dr Murdoch was sent for from
Auchenlochan, and for a fortnight Mr McCunn had to endure mustard
plasters and mustard baths, to swallow various medicines, and to
submit to a rigorous diet.  The pains declined, but he found
himself to his disgust in a low state of general health, easily
tired, liable to sudden cramps, and with a poor appetite for his
meals.  After three weeks of this condition he lost his temper.
Summer was beginning, and he reflected that, being now sixty-three
years of age, he had only a limited number of summers left to him.
His gorge rose at the thought of dragging his wing through the
coming delectable months--long-lighted June, the hot July noons
with the corncrakes busy in the hay, the days on August hills, red
with heather and musical with bees.  He curbed his distaste for
medical science, and departed to Edinburgh to consult a specialist.

That specialist gave him a purifying time.  He tested his blood and
his blood pressure, kneaded every part of his frame, and for the
better part of a week kept him under observation.  At the end he
professed himself clear in the general but perplexed in the
particular.

"You've never been ill in your life?" he said.  "Well, that is just
your trouble.  You're an uncommonly strong man--heart, lungs,
circulation, digestion, all in first-class order.  But it stands to
reason that you must have secreted poisons in your body, and you
have never got them out.  The best prescription for a fit old age
is a bad illness in middle life, or, better still, a major
operation.  It drains off some of the middle-age humours.  Well,
you haven't had that luck, so you've been a powder magazine with
some nasty explosives waiting for the spark.  Your tom-fool
escapade in the Stinchar provided the spark, and here you are--a
healthy man mysteriously gone sick.  You've got to be pretty
careful, Mr McCunn.  It depends on how you behave in the next few
months whether you will be able to fish for salmon on your
eightieth birthday, or be doddering round with two sticks and a
shawl on your seventieth."

Mr McCunn was scared, penitent and utterly docile.  He professed
himself ready for the extremest measures, including the drawing of
every tooth in his head.

The specialist smiled.  "I don't recommend anything so drastic.
What you want first of all is an exact diagnosis.  I can assess
your general condition, but I can't put my finger on the precise
mischief.  That needs a technique which we haven't developed
sufficiently in this country.  Next, you must have treatment, but
treatment is a comparatively simple affair if you first get the
right diagnosis.  So I am going to send you to Germany."

Mr McCunn wailed.  Banishment from his beloved Blaweary was a
bitter pill.

"Yes, to Germany.  To quite a pretty place called Rosensee, in
Saxon Switzerland.  There's a kurhaus there run by a man called
Christoph.  You never heard his name, of course--few people have--
but he is a therapeutic genius of the first order.  You can take my
word for that.  I've known him again and again pull people out of
their graves.  His main subject is nerves, but he is good for
everything that is difficult and mysterious, for in my opinion he
is the greatest diagnoser in the world. . . .  By the way, you live
in Carrick?  Well, I sent one of your neighbours to Rosensee last
year--Sir Archibald Roylance--he was having trouble with a damaged
leg--and now he walks nearly as well as you and me.  It seems there
was a misplaced sinew which everybody else had overlooked. . . .
Dr Christoph will see you three times a day, stare at you like an
owl, ask you a thousand questions and make no comment for at least
a fortnight.  Then he will deliver judgment, and you may take it
that it will be right.  After that the treatment is a simple
matter.  In a week or two you will be got up in green shorts and a
Tyrolese hat and an alpenstock and a rope round your middle,
climbing the little rocks of those parts. . . .  Yes, I think I can
promise you that you'll be fit and ready for the autumn salmon."

Mr McCunn, trained to know a competent man when he saw him,
accepted the consultant's prescription, and rooms were taken for
him at the Rosensee kurhaus.  His wife did not accompany him for
three reasons: first, she had a profound distaste for foreign
countries and regarded Germany as still a hostile State; second,
she could not believe that rheumatism, which was an hereditary
ailment in her own family, need be taken seriously, so she felt no
real anxiety about his health; third, he forbade her.  She proposed
to stay at Blaweary till the end of June, and then to await her
husband's return at a Rothesay hydropathic.  So early in the month
Mr McCunn a little disconsolately left these shores.  He took with
him as body-servant and companion one Peter Wappit, who at Blaweary
was game-keeper, forester and general handy-man.  Peter, having
fought in France with the Scots Fusiliers, and having been two
years a prisoner in Germany, was believed by his master to be an
adept at foreign tongues.



Nor was there any profound reason in the nature of things why Lord
Rhynns, a well-preserved gentleman of sixty-seven, should have
tumbled into a ditch that spring at Vallescure and broken his left
leg.  He was an active man and a careful, but his mind had been
busy with the Newmarket entries, so that he missed a step, rolled
some yards down a steep slope of rock and bracken, and came to rest
with a leg doubled unpleasantly under him.  The limb was well set,
but neuritis followed, with disastrous consequences to the Rhynns
ménage.  For his wife, whose profession was a gentle invalidism,
found herself compelled to see to household affairs, and as a
result was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  The family moved
from watering-place to watering-place, seeking a cure for his
lordship's affliction, till at the mountain village of Unnutz Lady
Rhynns could bear it no longer.  A telegram was despatched to their
only child requiring her instant attendance upon distressed
parents.

This was a serious blow to Miss Alison Westwater, who had been
making very different plans for the summer.  She was then in
London, living with her Aunt Harriet, who two years before had
espoused Mr Thomas Carlyle Craw, the newspaper magnate.  It was the
Craws' purpose to go north after Ascot to the Westwater house,
Castle Gay, in the Canonry, of which Mr Craw had a long lease, and
Alison, for whom a very little of London sufficed, had exulted in
the prospect.  Now she saw before her some dismal weeks--or months--
in an alien land, in the company of a valetudinarian mother and a
presumably irascible father.  Her dreams of Scotland, to which she
was passionately attached, of salmon in the Callowa and trout in
the hill lochs and bright days among the heather, had to be
replaced by a dreary vista of baking foreign roads, garish foreign
hotels, tarnished pine-woods, tidy clothes and all the things which
her soul abominated.

There was perhaps more of a cosmic motive in the determination that
summer of the doings of Mr Dougal Crombie and Sir Archibald
Roylance, for in their cases we touch the fringe of high politics.
Dougal was now a force, almost THE force, in the Craw Press.  The
general manager, Mr Archibald Bamff, was growing old, he had taken
to himself a wife, and his fancy toyed pleasantly with retirement
to some country hermitage.  So in the past year Dougal had been
gradually taking over his work, and, since he had the complete
confidence of Mr Craw, and the esteem of Mr Craw's masterful wife,
he found himself in his early twenties charged with much weighty
and troublesome business.  He was a power behind the throne, and
the more potent because few suspected his presence.  Only one or
two people--a Cabinet minister, an occasional financial magnate, a
few highly placed Government officials--realised the authority that
was wielded by this sombre and downright young man.  Early in June
he set out on an extensive Continental trip, the avowed purpose of
which was to look into certain paper-making concerns which Mr Craw
had acquired after the war.  But his main object was not disclosed,
for it was deeply secret.  Mr Craw had long interested himself in
the republic of Evallonia, his sympathies being with those who
sought to restore the ancient monarchy.  Now it appeared that the
affairs of that country were approaching a crisis, and it was
Dougal's mission to spy out the land.

As for Sir Archibald Roylance, he had been saddled with an
honourable but distasteful duty.  He had been the better part of
two years in the House of Commons, and had already made a modest
mark.  He spoke infrequently and always on matters which he knew
something about--the air, agriculture, foreign affairs--and his
concise and well-informed speeches were welcomed amid the common
verbiage of debate.  He had become parliamentary private secretary
to the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who had been at school
with him.  That summer the usual Disarmament Conference was
dragging its slow length along; it became necessary for Mr
Despenser, the Under-Secretary, to go to Geneva, and Sir Archie was
ordered to accompany him.  He received the mandate with little
pleasure.  The session that summer would end early, and he wanted
to get to Crask, for he had been defrauded of his Easter holiday in
the Highlands.  Geneva he believed might last for months and he
detested the place, which, as Lord Lamancha had once said, was full
of the ghosts of mouldy old jurisconsults, and the living presence
of cosmopolitan bores.  But his spirits had improved when he
discovered that he might take Janet with him.

"We'll find a chance of slipping away," he told his wife.  "One
merit of these beastly conferences is that they are always
adjourning.  We'll hop it into eastern Europe or some other fruity
place.  Hang it all, now that I've got the use of both legs, I
don't see why we shouldn't climb a mountain or two.  Dick Hannay's
yarns have made me rather keen to try that game."

Certain of these transmigrations played havoc with the plans of Mr
John Galt, of St. Mark's College, Cambridge, who, having just
attained a second class in his Tripos and having so concluded his
university career, felt himself entitled to an adequate holiday.
He had intended to make his headquarters at Blaweary, which was the
only home he had ever known, and thence to invade the Canonry,
fishing its lochs and sleeping in its heather.  But Blaweary would
presently be shut up in Mr McCunn's absence, and if Alison
Westwater was not at Castle Gay, the Canonry lost all its charm.
Still, he must have some air and exercise.  The summer term had
been busy and stuffy, and to a Rugby player there were few
attractions in punts among lilied backwaters.  He would probably
have to go alone to the Canonry, but his fancy had begun to toy
with another scheme--a walking-tour in southeastern France or among
the Jura foothills, where new sights and smells and sounds would
relieve his loneliness.  It was characteristic of him that he never
thought of finding a male companion; for the last two years Alison
had been for him the only companion in the world.

On the 13th of June he was still undecided, but that night his
thoughts were narrowed to a happy orbit.  For Alison was dining
with him before her journey abroad, and together they were going on
to a party which the Lamanchas were giving to the delegates to an
international conference then in session in London.  For one
evening at least the world was about to give him all he desired.

It was a warm night, but the great room at Maurice's was cool with
fans and sunblinds, though every table was occupied.  From their
corner, at the foot of the shallow staircase which is the main
entrance, they had an excellent view of the company.  There seemed
to be a great many uniforms about, and a dazzling array of orders,
no doubt in view of the Lamancha function.  It was easy to talk,
for at Maurice's there is no band till supper-time.

"You shouldn't have brought me here, Jaikie," said Alison.  "It's
too extravagant.  And you're giving me far too good a dinner."

"It's a celebration," was the answer.  "I've done with Cambridge."

"Are you sorry?"

"No.  I liked it, for I like most things, but I don't want to
linger over them."

The girl laughed merrily, and a smile slowly crept into Jaikie's
face.

"You're quite right," he said.  "That was a priggish thing to say,
but it's true, all the same."

"I know.  I never met anyone who wasted so little time in regrets.
I wish I were like you, for I want anything I like to go on for
ever.  Cambridge must have slipped off you like water off a duck's
back.  What did you get out of it?"

"Peace to grow up.  I've very nearly grown up now.  I have
discovered most of the things I can do and the things I can't.  I
know the things I like and the things I don't."

Alison knitted her brows.  "That's not much good.  So do I.  The
thing to find out is, what you can do BEST and what you like MOST.
You told me a year ago that that was what you were after.  Have you
decided?"

"No," was the glum answer.  "I think I have collected the material,
so to speak, but I haven't sorted it out.  I was looking to you to
help me this summer in the Canonry, and now you're bolting to Italy
or somewhere."

"Not Italy, my dear.  A spot called Unnutz in the Tirol.  You're
not very good at geography."

"Mayn't I come too?"

"No, you mayn't.  You'd simply loath it.  A landscape like a
picture postcard.  Tennis and bumble-puppy golf and promenades, all
in smart clothes.  Infinite boring evenings when I have to play
picquet with Papa or talk hotel French to Mamma's friends.
Besides, my family wouldn't understand you.  You haven't been
properly presented to them, and Unnutz is not the place for that.
You wouldn't be at your best there."

Two people passed on the way to their table, a tall young man with
a lean ruddy face, and a pretty young woman, whose hair was nearly
as bright a thing as Alison's.  The young woman stopped.

"My dear Allie," she cried, "I haven't seen you for ages.  Archie,
it's Cousin Allie.  They tell me you're being dragged abroad, the
same as us.  What's your penitentiary?  Ours is Geneva."

"Mine's a place in the Tirol.  Any chance of our meeting?"

"There might be.  Archie has a notion of dashing about, for
apparently an international conference is mostly adjournments.
He's so spry on his legs since Dr Christoph took him in hand that
he rather fancies himself as a mountaineer.  What's your address?"

The lady scribbled it down in a notebook which she took from her
bag, nodded gaily, and followed her husband and a waiter to their
own table.  Alison looked after them.

"That's the nicest couple on earth.  She was Janet Raden, a sort of
cousin of mine.  Her husband, Archie Roylance . . ."

Jaikie interrupted.

"Great Scot!  Is that Sir Archibald Roylance?  I once knew him
pretty well--for one day.  I've told you about the Gorbals Diehards
and Huntingtower.  He was the ally we enlisted--lived at a place
called the Mains of Garple.  Ask Mr McCunn about him.  I've often
wondered when I should see him again, for I felt pretty certain I
would--some day.  He hasn't changed much."

"He can't change.  Sir Archie is the most imperishable thing God
ever created.  He'll be a wild boy till he's ninety.  Even with
Janet to steady him I consider him dangerous, especially now that
he has no longer a game leg. . . .  Hullo, Jaikie.  We're digging
into the past to-night.  Look who's over there."

She nodded towards a very brilliant table where some twenty people
were dining, most of them in uniform.  Among them was a fair young
man in ordinary evening dress, without any decorations.  He
suddenly turned his face, recognised Alison, and, with a word of
apology to the others, left his seat and came towards her.  When
she rose and curtsied, Jaikie had a sudden recollection.

"It is Miss Westwater, is it not?" said the young man, bowing over
her hand.  "My adorable preserver!  I have not forgotten Prince
Charlie and the Solway sands."

He turned to Jaikie.

"And the Moltke of the campaign, too!  What is the name?  Wait a
minute.  I have it--Jaikie.  What fun to see you again!  Are you
two by any happy chance espoused?"

"Not yet," said Alison.  "What are you doing in England, sir?"

"Holidaying.  I cannot think why all the world does not holiday in
England.  It is the only really peaceful and pleasant place."

"How true, sir!  I have to go abroad to-morrow, and I feel like an
exile."

"Then why do you go?"

"I am summoned by neglected parents.  To Unnutz, in the Tirol."

The young man's pleasant face grew suddenly grave.

"Unnutz.  Above the Waldersee, in the Firnthal?"

"The same.  Do you know it, sir?"

"I know it.  I do not think it a very good place for a holiday--not
this summer.  But if it becomes unpleasant you can return home, for
you English are always free to travel.  But I should be careful in
Unnutz, my dear Miss Westwater, and I should take Mr Jaikie with
you as a protector."

He shook hands and departed smiling, but he left on the two the
impression of an unexpected solemnity.

"What do you suppose is worrying Prince John?" Alison asked.

"The affairs of Evallonia.  You remember at Castle Gay we thought
the Republic would blow up any moment and that a month or two would
see Prince John on the throne.  That's two years ago and nothing
has happened.  Dougal is out there now looking into the situation.
He may ginger them up."

"What makes him so solemn about Unnutz?  By all accounts it's the
ordinary gimcrack little foreign watering-place.  He talked of it
as if it were a sort of Chicago slum."

"He is a wise man, for he said you should take me with you."

They had reached the stage of coffee and cigarettes, and were now
more free to watch their neighbours.  It was a decorous assembly,
in accordance with the tradition of Maurice's, and the only gaiety
seemed to be among the womenkind of Prince John's party.  The
Prince's own face was very clear in the light of an overhanging
lamp, and both Alison and Jaikie found themselves watching it--its
slight heaviness in repose, its quick vivacity when interested, the
smile which drew half its charm from a most attractive wrinkling
around the eyes.

"It is the face of a prince," said Alison, "but not of a king--at
any rate, not the kind of king that wins a throne.  There's no
dynamite in it."

"What sort of face do you give makers of revolutions?" Jaikie
asked.

The girl swung round and regarded him steadily.

"Your sort," she said.  "You look so meek and good that everybody
loves you.  And wise, wise like an old terrier.  And yet, in the
two years I have known you, you have filled up your time with the
craziest things.  First"--she counted on her fingers--"you went off
to Baffin Island to trade old rifles for walrus ivory."

Jaikie grinned.  "I made seventy-three pounds clear: I call that a
success."

"Then you walked from Cambridge to Oxford within a day and a
night."

"That was a failure.  I was lame for a fortnight and couldn't play
in the Welsh match."

"You went twice as a deck hand on a Grimsby trawler--first to Bear
Island and then to the Whales' Back.  I don't know where these
places are, but they sound beastly."

"They were.  I was sick most of the time."

"Last and worst, it was only your exams and my prayers that kept
you from trying to circumnavigate Britain in a sailing canoe, when
you would certainly have been drowned.  What do you mean by it,
Jaikie?  It looks as if you were as neurotic as a Bloomsbury
intellectual, though in a different way.  Why this restlessness?"

"I wasn't restless.  I did it all quite calmly, on purpose."  Into
Jaikie's small face there had come an innocent seriousness.

"You see," he went on, "when I was a small boy I was rather a hardy
citizen.  I've told you about that.  Then Mr McCunn civilised me,
which I badly needed.  But I didn't want it to soften me.  We are
living in a roughish world to-day, and it is going to get rougher,
and I don't want to think that there is any experience to which I
can't face up.  I've been trying to keep myself tough.  You see
what I mean, Alison?"

"I see.  It's rather like painting the lily, you know.  I wish I
were going to the Canonry, for there's a lot of things I want to
have out with you.  Promise to keep quiet till I come back."

The Lamanchas' party was so large and crowded that Alison and
Jaikie found it easy to compass solitude.  Once out of the current
that sucked through the drawing-rooms towards the supper-room there
were quiet nooks to be discovered in the big house.  One such they
found in an alcove, where the upper staircase ascended from the
first floor, and where, at a safe distance, they could watch the
procession of guests.  Alison pointed out various celebrities to
the interested Jaikie, and a number of relations with whom she had
no desire to have closer contact.  But on one of the latter she
condescended to details.  He was a very tall man, whose clothes,
even in that well-dressed assembly, were conspicuous for their
elegance.  He had a neatly trimmed blond beard, and hair worn a
little longer than the fashion and as wavy as a smart woman's
coiffure.  They only saw his profile as he ascended the stairs, and
his back as he disappeared into the main drawing-room.

"There's another cousin of mine," said the girl, "the queerest in
all our queer clan.  His name is Randal Glynde, and he has been
everything in his time from cow-puncher to film star, not to
mention diplomat, and various sorts of soldier, and somebody's
private secretary.  The family doesn't approve of him, for they
never know what he'll do next, but he was very nice to me when I
was a little girl, and I used to have a tremendous culte for him."

Jaikie was not listening, for he felt very depressed.  This was his
last hour with Alison for months, and the light had suddenly gone
out of his landscape.  He had never been lonely in his life before
he met her, having at the worst found good company in himself; but
now he longed for a companion, and out of the many millions of the
world's inhabitants there was only one that he wanted.

"I can't go to Scotland," he said.  "Blaweary is impossible, and if
I went into the Canonry with you not there I'd howl."

"Poor Jaikie!"  Alison laid a hand upon his.  "But it's only
another bit of the toughening you're so fond of.  I promise to
write to you a great deal, and it won't be long till the autumn.
You won't be half as lonely as I."

"I wish I thought that," said Jaikie, brightening a little.  "I
like being alone, but I don't like being lonely.  I think I'll go
abroad too."

"Why don't you join Mr McCunn?"

"He won't let me.  He's doing a cure and is forbidden company."

"Or Dougal?"

"He wouldn't have me either.  He thinks he's on some silly kind of
secret service, and he's as mysterious about it as a sick owl.  But
I might go for a tramp somewhere.  My finances will just run to
it."

"Hullo, here's Ran," said Alison.  The tall man with the fair beard
had drifted towards them, and was now looking down on the girl.  On
a closer view he appeared to be nearer forty than thirty.  Jaikie
noticed that he had Alison's piercing blue eyes, with the same
dancing light in them.  There and then, being accustomed to rapid
judgments, he felt well disposed towards the tall stranger.

"Alison dear."  Mr Glynde put his hand on the girl's head.  "I hear
that your father has at last achieved gout."

"No.  It's neuritis, which makes him much angrier.  He would accept
gout as a family legacy, but he dislikes unexpected visitations.  I
go out to him to-morrow."

"Unnutz, isn't it?  A dreary little place.  I fear you won't enjoy
it, my dear."

"Where have you come from, Ran?  We last heard of you in Russia."

"I have been in many places since Russia."  Mr Glynde's voice had
an odd quality in it, as if he were gently communing with himself.
"After a time in deep water I come up to breathe, and then go down
again."

"You've chosen very smart clothes to breathe in."

"I always try to suit my clothes to my company.  It is the only way
to be inconspicuous."

"Have you been writing any more poetry?"

"Not a word in English, but I have written some rather charming
things in mediæval Latin.  I'll send you them.  It is the best
tongue for a vagabond."

Alison introduced Jaikie.

"Here's another of your totem, Cousin Ran.  You can't corrupt him,
for he is quite as mad as you."

Mr Glynde smiled pleasantly as he shook hands, and Jaikie had an
impression that his eyes were the most intelligent that he had ever
seen, eyes which took in everything, and saw very deep, and had a
mind behind them that did not forget.  He felt too that something
in his own face pleased the other, for there was friendliness
behind the inquisition.

"He has just finished Cambridge, and finds himself at a loose end.
He is hesitating between Scotland and a tramp on the Continent.
What do you advise?"

"When you are young these decisions may be fateful things.  I have
always trusted to the spin of a coin.  I carry with me a Greek
stater which has made most of my decisions for me.  What about
tossing for it?"

He took from the pocket of his white waistcoat a small gold coin
and handed it to Jaikie.

"It's a lucky coin," he said.  "At least it has brought me infinite
amusement.  Try it."

Jaikie had a sudden queer feeling that the occasion had become
rather solemn, almost sacramental.  "Heads Scotland, tails abroad,"
he said and tossed.  It fell tails.

"Behold," said Mr Glynde, "your mind is made up for you.  You will
wander along in the white dust and drink country wine and doze in
the woods, knowing that the unseen Powers are with you.  Where, by
the way, did you think of going?  You have no preference?  You have
been very little abroad?  How fortunate to have all Europe spread
out for your choice.  But I should not go too far east, Mr Galt.
Keep to the comfortable west if you want peace.  If you go too far
east this summer, you may find that the spin of my little stater
has been rather too fateful."

As Jaikie put Alison into a taxi, he observed Mr Glynde leaving the
house on foot with a companion.  He had a glimpse of that
companion's face, and saw that it was Prince John of Evallonia.



I


THE MAN WITH THE ELEPHANT


The inn at Kremisch, the Stag with the Two Heads, has an upper room
so bowed with age that it leans drunkenly over the village street.
It is a bare place, which must be chilly in winter, for the old
casement has many chinks in it, and the china stove does not look
efficient, and the rough beechen table, marked by many beer mugs,
and the seats of beechwood and hide are scarcely luxurious.  But on
this summer night to one who had been tramping all day on roads
deep in white dust under a merciless sun it seemed a haven of ease.
Jaikie had eaten an admirable supper on a corner of the table, a
supper of cold ham, an omelet, hot toasted rye-cakes and a
seductive cheese.  He had drunk wine tapped from a barrel and cold
as water from a mountain spring, and had concluded with coffee and
cream in a blue cup as large as a basin.  Now he could light his
pipe and watch the green dusk deepen behind the onion spire of the
village church.

The milestones in his journey had been the wines.  Jaikie was no
connoisseur, and indeed as a rule preferred beer, but the vintage
of a place seemed to give him the place's flavour and wines made a
diary of his pilgrimage.  His legs bore him from valley to valley,
but he drank himself from atmosphere to atmosphere.  He had begun
among strong burgundies which needed water to make a thirst-
quenching drink, and continued through the thin wines of the hills
to the coarse red stuff of south Germany and a dozen forgotten
little local products.  In one upland place he had found a drink
like the grey wine of Anjou, in another a sweet thing like Madeira,
and in another a fiery sherry.  Each night at the end of his tramp
he concocted a long drink, and he stuck manfully to the juice of
the grape; so, having a delicate palate and a good memory, he had
now behind him a map of his track picked out in honest liquors.

Each was associated with some vision of sun-drenched landscape.  He
had been a month on the tramp, but he seemed to have walked through
continents.  As he half dozed at the open window, it was pleasant
to let his fancy run back along the road.  It had led him through
vineyards grey at the fringes with dust, through baking beet-fields
and drowsy cornlands and solemn forests; up into wooded hills and
flowery meadows, and once or twice almost into the jaws of the
great mountains; through every kind of human settlement, from
hamlets which were only larger farms to brisk burghs clustered
round opulent town-houses or castles as old as Charlemagne; by
every kind of stream--unfordable great rivers, and milky mountain-
torrents, and reedy lowland waters, and clear brooks slipping
through mint and water-cress.  He had walked and walked, seeking to
travel and not to arrive, and making no plans except that his face
was always to the sunrise.  He was very dimly aware at any moment
of his whereabouts, for his sole map was a sketchy thing out of a
Continental Bradshaw.

But he had walked himself into contentment.  At the start he had
been restless and lonely.  He wished that he could have brought
Woolworth, now languishing at Blaweary, but he could not condemn
that long-suffering terrier to months of quarantine.  He wrote
disconsolate letters to Alison in his vile handwriting, and
received from her at various postes-restantes replies which
revealed the dullness of her own life at Unnutz.  She had nothing
to write about, and it was never her habit to spoil good paper with
trivial reflections.  There was a time at the start when Jaikie's
mind had been filled with exasperating little cares, so that he
turned a blank face to the world he was traversing.  His future--
what was he to do now that he was done with Cambridge?  Alison--his
need of her grew more desperate every day, but what could he offer
her worthy of her acceptance?  Only his small dingy self, he
concluded, with nothing to his credit except a second-class degree,
some repute at Rugby football, and the slenderest of bank balances.
It seemed the most preposterous affair of a moth and a star.

But youth and the sun and wide spaces played their old healing
part.  He began to rise whistling from his bed in a pinewood or in
a cheap country inn, with a sense that the earth was very spacious
and curious.  The strong aromatic sunlight drugged him into
cheerfulness.  The humours of the road were spread before him.  He
had learned to talk French fairly well, but his German was scanty;
nevertheless, he had the British soldier's gift of establishing
friendship on a meagre linguistic basis, and he slipped inside the
life of sundry little communities.  His passion for new landscapes
made every day's march a romance, and, having a love of the human
comedy, he found each night's lodging an entertainment.  He
understood that he was looking at things in a new perspective.
What had seemed a dull track between high walls was now expanding
into open country.

Especially he thought happily about Alison.  He did not think of
her as a bored young woman with peevish parents in a dull health
resort, but as he knew her in the Canonry, an audacious ally in any
venture, staunch as the hills, kind as a west wind.  So far as she
was concerned, prudential thoughts about the future were an insult.
She was there waiting for him as soon as he could climb to her high
level.  He encountered no delicacy of scene or weather but he
longed to have her beside him to enjoy it.  He treasured up scraps
of wayside humour for her amusement, and even some shy meditations
which some day he would confide to her.  They did not go into his
letters, which became daily scrappier--but these letters now
concluded with what for Jaikie were almost the messages of a lover.

He was in a calmer mood, too, about himself.  Had he been more
worldly-wise he might have reflected that some day he must be a
rich man.  Dickson McCunn had no chick nor child nor near relation,
and he and Dougal were virtually his adopted sons.  Dougal was
already on the road to wealth and fame, and Dickson would see that
Jaikie was well provided for.  But characteristically he never
thought of that probability.  He had his own way to make with no
man's aid, and he was only waiting to discover the proper starting-
point.  But a pleasing lethargy possessed him.  This delectable
summer world was not the place for making plans.  So far he was
content with what he had done.  Dickson had drawn him out of the
depths into the normal light of day, and it had been his business
to accustom his eyes to it.  He was aware that, without Cambridge,
he would have always been a little shy and suspicious of the life
of a class into which he had not been born; now he knew it for what
it was worth, and could look at it without prejudice but also
without glamour.  "Brother to a beggar, and fellow to a king"--what
was Dougal's phrase?  Jaikie was no theorist, but he had a working
philosophy, with the notion at the back of his head that human
nature was much the same everywhere, and that one might dig out of
the unlikeliest places surprising virtues.  He considered that he
had been lucky enough to have the right kind of education for the
practice of this creed.

But it was no philosopher who sat with his knees hunched on the
window-seat, but a drowsy and rather excited boy.  His travels had
given him more than content, for in these last days a faint but
delicious excitement had been creeping into his mind.  He was not
very certain of his exact whereabouts on the map, but he knew that
he had crossed the border of the humdrum world and was in a land of
enchantments.  There was nothing in the ritual of his days to
justify this; his legs like compasses were measuring out the same
number of miles; the environment was the same, the slow kindly
peasants, the wheel of country life, the same bright mornings and
cool evenings, the same plain meals voraciously eaten, and hard
beds in which he fell instantly asleep.  He could speak little of
the language, and he did not know one soul within a hundred miles.
He was the humblest of pilgrims, and the lowness of his funds would
presently compel his return.  Nevertheless, he was ridiculously
expectant.  He laughed at himself, but he could not banish the
mood.  He was awaiting something--or something was awaiting him.

The apple-green twilight deepened into emerald, and then into a
velvet darkness, for the moon would rise late, and a haze obscured
the stars.  Long ago the last child had been hunted from the street
into bed.  Long ago the last villagers had left the seat under the
vine trellis where they had been having their evening sederunt.
Long ago the oxen had been brought into the byres and the goats
driven in from the hillside.  A wood-wagon had broken down by the
bridge, and the blacksmith had been hammering at its axle, but his
job was finished, and a spark of a lamp beaconed the derelict cart.
Otherwise there was no light in earth or heaven, and no sound
except the far-away drone of a waterfall in the high woods and an
occasional stirring of beasts in byre or stable.  Kremisch was in
the deep sleep of those who labour hard, bed early, and rise with
the dawn.  Jaikie grew drowsy.  He shook out his pipe, drew a long
breath of the cool night air, and rose to take the lamp from the
table and ascend to his bedroom.

Suddenly a voice spoke.  It came from the outer air at about the
level of the window.  And it asked in German for a match.

Balaam was not more startled by the sudden loquacity of his ass
than was Jaikie by this aerial summons.  It shook him out of his
sleepiness and made him nearly drop the lamp.  "God bless my soul,"
he said--his chief ejaculation, which he had acquired from Mr
McCunn.

"He will," said the voice, "if you'll give me a light for my
cigarette."

The spirit apparently spoke English, and Jaikie, reassured, held
the lamp to the darkness of the open casement.  There was a face
there, suspended in the air, a face with cheeks the colour of a dry
beech leaf and a ragged yellow beard.  It was a friendly face, and
in the mouth was an unlit cigarette.

"What are you standing on?" Jaikie asked, for it occurred to him
that this must be a man on stilts.  He had heard of these as a
custom in malarial foreign places.

"To be accurate, I am sitting," was the answer.  "Sitting on an
elephant, if you must know.  An agreeable female whom I call
Aurunculeia.  Out of Catullus, you remember.  Almost his best
poem."

Jaikie lit a match, but the speaker waved it aside.  "I think, if
you don't mind," he said, "I'll come in and join you for a minute.
One doesn't often meet an Englishman in these parts, and
Aurunculeia has no vulgar passion for haste.  As you have no doubt
guessed, she and I are part of a circus--an integral and vital
part--what you might call the primum mobile.  But we were detained
by a little accident.  I was asleep, and we strayed from the road
and did havoc in a field of marrows, which made some unpleasantness.
So our lovely companions have faded and gone ahead to savour the
fleshpots of Tarta, while we follow at our leisure.  You have never
ridden on an elephant?  If you go slow enough, believe me it is the
very poetry of motion, for you are part, as it were, of a cosmic
process.  How does it go?  'Moved round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks and stones and trees.'"

A word was spoken in a lower tone, there was the sound of the
shuffling of heavy feet, and a man stepped lightly on to the
window-sill and through the casement.  His first act was to turn up
the wick of the lamp on the table, and light his cigarette at its
funnel.

Jaikie found himself gazing at a figure which might have been the
Pied Piper.  It was very tall and very ragged.  It wore an old
tunic of horizon-blue from which most of the buttons had gone, a
scarlet cummerbund, and flapping cotton trousers which had once
been white.  It had no hat, and besides its clothes, its only other
belonging was a long silver-mounted porcupine quill, which may have
been used for the encouragement of Aurunculeia.

The scarecrow looked at Jaikie and saw something there which amused
him, for he set his arms akimbo and laughed heartily.  "How nature
creeps up to art!" he cried.  "Had this been an episode in a novel,
it would have been condemned for its manifest improbability.  There
was an impish propulsive power about my little gold stater."

He took a small coin from his pocket and regarded it affectionately.
Then he asked a question which brought Jaikie out of his chair.
"Have you any news of Cousin Alison, Mr Galt?"

Slowly, to Jaikie's startled sight, the features of the scarecrow
became the lineaments of the exquisite Mr Randal Glynde.  The neat
hair was now shaggy and very dusty, the beard was untrimmed, and
every semblance of respectability had gone from his garments.  But
the long lean wrists were the same, the long slim fingers, and the
penetrating blue eyes.

Mr Glynde replaced the stater in some corner of his person, and
beamed upon Jaikie.  He stretched an arm and grasped the jug of
wine of which Jaikie had drunk about half, took a long pull at it,
and set it down with a wry face.

"Vinegar," he said.  "I had forgotten that the Flosgebirge wine
sours in an hour.  Do not trouble yourself, Mr Galt, for I have
long ago supped.  We were talking about Cousin Alison, for whom I
understand you have a kindness.  So have I.  So gracious is my
memory of her that I have been reciting verses in her honour in the
only tongue in which a goddess should be hymned.


     Alison, bella puella candida,
     Quae bene superas lac et lilium
     Album, quae simul rosam rubidam
     Aut expolitum ebur Indicum,
     Pande, puella, pande capillulos
     Flavos, lucentes ut aurum nitidum.


What puzzles me is whether that is partly my own or wholly John the
Silentiar's.  I had been reading John the Silentiar, but the book
was stolen from me, so I cannot verify. . . .  No, I will not sleep
here.  I must sleep at Tarta, though it will be broad daylight
before I shut my eyes.  Tatius, my manager, is a worthy man, but he
is to Meleager my clown as acid to a raw wound, and without me to
calm them they will be presently rubbing each other's noses in the
mud."

"Are you a circus proprietor?" Jaikie asked.

Mr Glynde nodded pleasantly.

"In me you see the sole proprietor of the epochal, the
encyclopædic, the grandiose Cirque Doré of Aristide Lebrun.  The
epithets are not mine, but those of the late Aristide, who these
three years has been reposing in full evening dress in the cemetery
of Montléry.  I purchased the thing from his widow, stock-in-trade,
good-will and all--even the gentle Aurunculeia.  I have travelled
with it from the Pyrenees to the Carpathians and from the Harz to
the Apennines.  Some day, who knows, I will widen these limits and
go from the Sierra-Nevada to the Urals, and from the Jotunheim to
Parnassus.  Geography has always intoxicated me."

"I understand the fun of travelling," said Jaikie, "but isn't a
circus rather heavy baggage to lug after you?"

"Ah, no.  You do not realise the power of him who carries with him
a little world of merriment, which can be linked to that substratum
of merriment which is found in every human species.  No fumbling
for him--he finds the common touch at once.  He must suit himself
of course to various tastes.  Clowning in one place, horse-tricks
in a second, the sweet Aurunculeia in a third.  The hills have
different fancies from the valleys, and the valleys from the
plains.  The Cirque Doré is small, but I flatter myself it is
select.  We have as fine white barbs as ever came out of Africa,
and Meleager my clown has the common denominator of comedy at
which all Europe can laugh.  No women.  Too temperamental and
troublesome.  My people quarrel in every known tongue, but, being
males, it is summer lightning. . . .  Ah, Mr Galt, I cannot explain
to you the intoxication of shifting camp weekly, not from town to
town, but from one little human cosmos to another.  I have the key
which unlocks all doors, and can steal into the world at the back
of men's minds, about which they do not speak to their politicians
and scarcely even to their priests.

"I have power, too," Mr Glynde went on; "for I appeal to something
old and deep in man's nature.  Before this I have wrecked a
promising insurrection through the superior charm of my circus over
an émeute in a market-place.  I have protected mayors and
burgomasters from broken heads, and maybe from cut throats, by my
mild distractions.  And I have learned many things that are hidden
from diplomats and eager journalists.  I, the entertainer, the fils
de joie, I am becoming an expert, if I may say so modestly, on the
public opinion of Europe--or rather on that incoherent soul which
is greater than opinion."

"Well, and what do you make of it?" Jaikie asked.  He was
fascinated by his visitor, the more so as he was a link with
Alison, but sleep was descending upon him like an armed man, and he
asked the conventional question without any great desire to hear
the answer.

"Bad," said Mr Glynde.  "Or, since a moral judgment is unnecessary,
shall I say odd?  We are now in the midst of the retarded
liquidation of the war.  I do not mean debts and currencies and
economic fabrics, but something much more vital--the thoughts of
men.  The democracies have lost confidence.  So long as they
believed in themselves they could make shift with constitutions and
parliaments and dull republics.  But once let them lose confidence,
and they are like children in the dark, reaching out for the grasp
of a strong hand.  That way lies the dictator.  It might be the
monarch if we bred the right kind of king. . . .  Also there is
something more dangerous still, a stirring of youth, disappointed,
aggrieved youth, which has never known the discipline of war.
Imaginative and incalculable youth, which clamours for the moon and
may not be content till it has damaged most of the street lamps.

"But you nod," said Mr Glynde rising.  "I weary you.  You must to
bed and I to Tarta.  I must not presume upon the celestial patience
of Aurunculeia."

Jaikie rose too and found the tall man's hand on his shoulder.  He
observed sleepily that his visitor's face, now clear in the
lamplight, had changed, the smile had gone from it, and the eyes
were cool and rather grave.  Also the slight artifice of his
speech, which recalled an affected Cambridge don of his
acquaintance, was suddenly dropped.

"I gave you certain advice," said Mr Glynde, "when you spun my
stater in London.  I told you that if you wanted peace you should
stick to the west.  You are pretty far east, Mr Galt, so I assume
that a quiet life is not your first object.  You have been walking
blindly and happily for weeks waiting for what the days brought
forth.  Have you any very clear notion where you have got to?"

"I'm rather vague, for I have a rotten map.  But I know that I've
come to the end of my money.  To-morrow I must turn about and make
for home.  I mean to get to Munich and travel back by the cheapest
way."

"Three and a quarter miles from Kremisch the road to Tarta drops
into a defile among pine-trees.  At the top there are two block-
houses, one on each side of the highway.  If you walked that way
armed guards would emerge from the huts and demand your passport.
Also they would make an inquisition into your baggage more
peremptory than most customs-officers.  That is the frontier of
Evallonia."

Jaikie's sleepiness left him.  "Evallonia!" he cried.  "I had no
notion I was so near it."

"You have read of Evallonia in the English press?"

"Yes, and I have heard a lot about it.  I've met Evallonians too--
all sorts."  He counted on his fingers.  "Nine--ten, including
Prince John."

"Prince John!  Ah, you saw him at Lady Lamancha's party."

"I saw him two years before that in Scotland, and had a good deal
to do with him.  With the others, too.  I can tell you who they
were, for I'm not likely to forget them.  There were six
Republicans--Mastrovin, Dedekind, Rosenbaum, Ricci, Calaman, and
one whose name I never knew--a round-faced fellow in spectacles.
There were three Monarchists--Count Casimir Muresco, Doctor Jagon
and Prince Odalchini."

The tall man carefully closed the window, and sat down again.  When
he spoke it was in a low voice.

"You know some very celebrated people.  I think I can place you, Mr
Galt.  You are called Jaikie, are you not, by your friends?  Two
years ago you performed a very notable exploit, which resulted in
the saving of several honest men and the confounding of some who
were not so honest.  That story is famous in certain circles.  I
have laughed over it often, not dreaming that one day I should meet
the hero."

Jaikie shifted nervously, for praise made him unhappy.  "Oh, I
didn't do anything much.  It was principally Alison.  But what has
gone wrong with Evallonia?  I've been expecting ever since to hear
that the Monarchists had kicked out Mastrovin and his lot, but the
whole thing seems to have fizzled."

Mr Glynde was regarding him with steady eyes, which even in the dim
light seemed very bright.

"It has not fizzled, but Evallonia at this moment is in a critical
state.  It is no place for a quiet life, but then I do not think
that is what you like. . . .  Mr Galt, will you forgive me if I ask
you a personal question?  Have you any duty which requires your
immediate return home?"

"None.  But I've finished my money.  I have just about enough to
get me back."

"Money is nothing--that can be arranged.  I would ask another
question.  Have you any strong interest in Evallonian affairs?"

"No.  But some of my friends have--Mr Craw, the newspaper man, for
example, and Dougal Crombie, his chief manager."

Mr Glynde brooded.  "You know Mr Craw and Mr Crombie?  Of course
you would.  But you have no prepossession in the matter?  Except an
inclination to back your friends' view?"

"Yes.  I thought Prince John a decent fellow, and I liked the queer
old Monarchist chaps.  Also I greatly disliked Mastrovin and his
crowd.  They tried to bully me."

The other smiled.  "That I am sure was a bad blunder on their
part."  He was silent for a minute, and then he laid a hand on
Jaikie's knee.  "Mr Galt," he said solemnly, "if you continued your
walking-tour to-morrow eastward down the wooded glen, and passed
the frontier--I presume your passport is in order?--you would enter
a strange country.  How strange I have no time to tell you, but I
will say this--it is at the crisis of its destiny and any hour may
see a triumph or a tragedy.  I believe that you might be of some
use in averting tragedy.  You are a young man, and, I fancy, not
indisposed to adventure.  If you go home you will be out of danger
in that happy cosseted world of England.  If you go on, you will
certainly find danger, but you may also find wonderful things for
which danger is a cheap price.  How do you feel about it?"

Jaikie felt many things.  Now he knew why all day he had had that
curious sense of expectation.  There was a queer little flutter at
his heart.

"I don't know," he said.  "It's all rather sudden.  I should want
to hear more about it."

"You shall.  You shall hear everything before you take any step
which is irrevocable.  If you will make one day's march into
Evallonia, I will arrange that the whole situation is put honestly
before you. . . .  But no!  I have a conscience.  I can foretell
what you will decide, and I have no right even to bring you within
the possibility of that decision, for it will mean danger--it may
even mean death.  You are too young to gamble with."

"I think," said Jaikie, "I should like to put my nose inside
Evallonia just to say I'd been there.  You say I can come back if I
don't like it.  Where's that little coin of yours?  It sent me out
here, and it may as well decide what I do next."

"Sportsman," said Mr Glynde.  He produced the stater and handed it
to Jaikie, who spun it--"Heads go on, tails go home."  But owing
to the dim light, or perhaps to sleepy eyes, he missed his catch,
and the coin rolled on the floor.  He took the lamp to look for it,
and behold it was wedged upright in a crack in the board--neither
heads nor tails.

Mr Glynde laughed merrily.  "Apparently the immortal Gods will have
no part in this affair.  I don't blame them, for Evallonia is a
nasty handful.  The omens on the whole point to home.  Good night,
Mr Galt.  We shall no doubt meet in England."

"I'll sleep on it," said Jaikie.  "If I decide to go on a little
farther, what do I do?"

"You will reach Tarta by midday, and just beyond the bridge you
will see a gipsy-looking fellow, short but very square, with
whiskers and earrings and a white hat with 'Cirque Doré'
embroidered on it in scarlet.  That is Luigi, my chief fiddler.
You will ask him the way to the Cirque, and he will reply in
French, which I think you understand, that he knows a better
restaurant.  After that you will be in his charge.  Only I beg of
you to keep your mind unbiased by what I have said, and let sleep
give you your decision.  Like Cromwell I am a believer in
Providences, and since that wretched stater won't play the game,
you must wait for some other celestial guidance."

He opened the casement, spoke a word in an unknown tongue, and a
heavy body stirred in the dust below.  Then he stepped lightly into
the velvet darkness, and there followed a heaving and shuffling
which presently died away.  When a minute later the moon topped the
hill, the little street was an empty silver alley.



II


THE HOUSE OF THE FOUR WINDS


The night brought no inspiration to Jaikie, for his head was no
sooner on his chaff-filled pillow than he seemed to be awake in
broad daylight.  But the morning decided him.  There had been an
early shower, the dust was laid in the streets, and every cobble of
the side-walk glistened.  From the hills blew a light wind, bearing
a rooty fragrance of pine and moss and bracken.  A delicious smell
of hot coffee and new bread ascended from below; cats were taking
their early airing; the vintner opposite, who had a face like a
sun, was having a slow argument with the shoemaker; a pretty girl
with a basket on her arm was making eyes at a young forester in
velveteen breeches and buckskin leggings; a promising dog-fight was
in progress near the bridge, watched by several excited boys; the
sky above had the soft haze which promises a broiling day.

Jaikie felt hungry both for food and enterprise.  The morning's
freshness was like a draught of spring water, and every sense was
quick and perceptive.  He craned his head out of the window, and
looked back along the way he had come the night before.  It showed
a dull straight vista between trees.  He looked eastward, and
there, beyond the end of the village, the world dropped away, and
he was looking at the blue heavens and a most appetising crook in
the road, which seemed to hesitate, like a timid swimmer, before
plunging downwards.  There could be no question about it.  On this
divinest of mornings he refused dully to retrace his steps.  He
would descend for one day into Evallonia.

He breakfasted on fried eggs and brook trout, paid a diminutive
bill, buckled on his knapsack, and before ten o'clock had left
Kremisch behind him.  The road was all that it had promised.  It
wound through an upland meadow with a strong blue-grey stream to
keep it company, and every now and then afforded delectable
glimpses of remote and shining plains.  The hills shouldered it
friendlily, hills with wide green rides among the firs and
sometimes a bald nose of granite.  Jaikie had started out with his
mind chiefly on Randal Glynde, that suddenly-discovered link with
Alison.  Evallonia and its affairs did not interest him, or Mr
Glynde's mysterious summons to adventure.  His meditations during
recent weeks had been so much on his own land and the opportunities
which it might offer to a deserving young man that he was not
greatly concerned with the doings of foreigners, even though some
of them were his acquaintances.  But he was strongly interested in
Mr Glynde.  He had never met anybody quite like him, so cheerful
and secure in his absurdities.  The meeting with him had rolled
from Jaikie's back many of the cares of life.  The solemnity with
which he had proposed a visit to Evallonia seemed in the retrospect
to be out of the picture and therefore negligible.  Mr Glynde was
an apostle of fantasy and his seriousness was itself a comedy.  The
memory of him harmonised perfectly with this morning world, which
with every hundred yards was unveiling a new pageant of delight.

Presently he forgot even Mr Glynde in the drama of the roadside.
There was a pool in the stream, ultramarine over silver sand, with
a very big trout in it--not less than three pounds in weight.
There was a bird which looked like a dipper, but was not a dipper.
There was a hawk in the sky, a long-winged falcon of a kind he had
never seen before.  And on a boulder was perched--rarity of
rarities--an unmistakable black redstart. . . .  And then the glen
seemed to lurch forward and become a defile, down which the stream
dropped in a necklace of white cascades.  At the edge was a group
of low buildings, and out of them came two men carrying rifles.

Jaikie looked with respect at the first Evallonians he had seen on
their native heath.  They were small men with a great breadth of
shoulder, and broad good-humoured countenances--a typical compound,
he thought, of Slav and Teuton.  But their manner belied their
faces, for they were almost truculent, as if they had been soured
by heavy and unwelcome duties.  They examined everything in his
pack and his pockets, they studied his passport with profound
suspicion, and they interrogated him closely in German, which he
followed with difficulty.  Several times they withdrew to consult
together; once they retired into the block-house, apparently to
look up some book of regulations.  It was the better part of an
hour before they allowed him to pass.  Then something ingenuous in
Jaikie's face made them repent of their doubts.  They grimaced and
shook hands with him, and shouted Grüss Gott till he had turned a
corner.

"Evallonia is a nervous country," thought Jaikie.  "Lucky I had
nothing contraband on me, or I should be bankrupt."

After that the defile opened into a horseshoe valley, with a few
miles ahead the spires of a little town.  He saw the loop of a
river, of which the stream he had followed must be a tributary.  On
the north side was something which he took for a hill, but which
closer inspection revealed to be a dwelling.  It stood high and
menacing, with the town huddled up to it, built of some dark stone
which borrowed no colour from the bright morning.  On three sides
it seemed to be bounded by an immense park, for he saw great spaces
of turf and woodland which contrasted with the chessboard tillage
of other parts of the plain.

A peasant was carrying hay from a roadside meadow.  Jaikie pointed
to the place and asked its name.

The man nodded.  "Yes, Tarta."

"And the castle?"

At first the man puzzled; then he smiled.  He pronounced a string
of uncouth vocables.  Then in halting German:  "It is the great
Schloss.  I have given you its name.  It means the House of the
Four Winds."

As Jaikie drew nearer the town he saw the reason why it was so
called.  Tarta stood in the mouth of a horseshoe and three glens
debouched upon it, his own from the west and two other sword-cuts
from the north and south.  It was clear that the castle must be a
very temple of Aeolus.  From three points of the compass the winds
would whistle down the mountain gullies, and on the east there was
no shelter from the devilments bred in the Asian steppes.

Before noon he was close to the confines of the little town.  His
stream had ceased to be a mountain torrent, and had expanded into
broad lagoons, and just ahead was its junction with the river.
Over the latter there was a high-backed bridge flanked by guard-
houses, and beyond a jumble of masonry which promised narrow old-
world streets.  The castle, seen at closer range, was more
impressive than ever.  It hung over the town like a thundercloud,
but a thundercloud from which the lightnings had fled, for it had a
sad air of desolation.  No flag flew from its turrets, no smoke
issued from its many chimneys, the few windows in the great black
sides which rose above the streets were like blind eyes.  Yet its
lifelessness made a strong appeal to Jaikie's fancy.  This bustling
little burgh under the shadow of a mediæval relic was like a living
thing tied to a corpse.  But was it really a corpse?  He guessed at
its vast bulk stretching northward into its wild park.  It might
have turned a cold shoulder on Tarta and yet within its secret
demesne be furiously alive.  Meantime it belied its name, for not a
breath of wind stirred in the sultry noon.  Somewhere beyond the
bridge must be Luigi, the chief fiddler of the Cirque Doré.  He
hoped that Luigi would take him where he could get a long drink.

He was to get the drink, but not from Luigi's hands.  On the side
of the bridge farthest from the town the road passed through a
piece of rough parkland, perhaps the common pasturage of the
mediæval township.  Here a considerable crowd had gathered, and
Jaikie pressed forward to discover the reason of it.  Down the road
from Tarta a company of young men was marching, with the obvious
intention of making camp in the park; indeed, certain forerunners
had already set up a grove of little shelter-tents.  They were
remarkable young men, for they carried themselves with disciplined
shoulders, and yet with the free swing from the hips of the
mountaineer.  Few of them were tall, but their leanness gave the
impression of a good average height, and they certainly looked
amazingly hard and fit.  Jaikie, accustomed to judge physique on
the Rugby field, was impressed by their light-foot walk and their
easy carriage.  They were not in the least like the Wandervögel
whom he had met on many German roads, comfortable sunburnt folk out
for a holiday.  These lads were in serious training, and they had
some purpose other than amusement.

As they passed, the men in the crowd saluted by raising the left
hand and the women waved their handkerchiefs.  In the rear rode a
young man, a splendid figure on a well-bred flea-bitten roan.  The
rank-and-file wore shorts and green shirts open at the neck, but
the horseman had breeches and boots and a belted green tunic, while
a long hunting-knife swung at his middle.  He was a tall fellow
with thick fair hair, a square face and dark eyebrows--a face with
which Jaikie was familiar in very different surroundings.

Jaikie, in the front row of the crowd, was so overcome with
amazement that his left hand remained unraised and he could only
stare.  The horseman caught sight of him, and he too registered
surprise, from which he instantly recovered.  He spoke a word to
the ranks; a man fell out, and beckoned Jaikie to follow.  The
other spectators fell back from him as from a leper, and he and his
warder followed the horse's tail into the open space, where the
rest were drawing up in front of the tents.

Then the horseman turned to him.

"Salute," he said.  Jaikie's arm shot up obediently.

The leader cast an eye over the ranks, and bade them stand easy and
then fall out.  He dismounted, flinging his bridle to an orderly.
"Follow me," he said to Jaikie in English, and led him to a spot on
the river-bank, where a larger tent had been set up.  Two lads were
busy there with kit and these he dismissed.  Then he turned to
Jaikie with a broad grin.  "What on earth are you doing here?" he
asked.

"Give me a drink first, Ashie," was the answer.

The young man dived into the tent and produced a bottle of white
wine, a bottle of a local mineral water, and two tumblers.  The two
clinked glasses.  Then he gave Jaikie a cigarette.  "Now," he said,
"what's your story?"

"I have been across half Europe," said Jaikie.  "I must have
tramped about five hundred miles.  My money's done, and I go home
to-morrow, but I thought I'd have a look inside Evallonia first.
But what are YOU doing, Ashie?  Is it Boy Scouts or a revolution?"

The other smiled and did not at once reply.  That was a mannerism
which the University of Cambridge had taught him, for when Count
Paul Jovian (he had half a dozen other Christian names which we may
neglect) entered St. Mark's he had been too loquacious.  He and a
cousin had shared lodgings, and at first they were not popular.
They had an unpleasant trick of being easily insulted, talking
about duels, and consequently getting their ears boxed.  When they
migrated within the College walls, the dislike of the cousin had
endured, but Count Paul began to make friends.  Finally came a
night when the cousin's trousers were removed and used to decorate
the roof, as public evidence of dislike, while Paul was unmolested.
That occasion gave him his nickname, for he was christened Asher by
a piously brought-up contemporary, the tribe of Asher having,
according to the Book of Judges, "abode in its breaches."  "Ashie"
he had remained from that day.

Jaikie had begun by disliking him, he was so noisy and strange and
flamboyant.  But Count Paul had a remarkable gift of adapting
himself to novel conditions.  Presently his exuberance quieted
down, he became more sparing in speech, he developed a sense of
humour and laboured to acquire the idiom of their little society.
In his second year he was indistinguishable from the ordinary
English undergraduate.  He had a pretty turn of speed, but it was
found impossible to teach him the Rugby game; at boxing too he was
a complete duffer; but he was a brilliant fencer, and he knew all
that was to be known about a horse.  Indeed, it was in connection
with horses that Jaikie first came to like him.  A groom from a
livery stable lost his temper with a hireling, who was badly bitted
and in a fractious temper.  The Count's treatment of the case
rejoiced Jaikie's heart.  He shot the man into the gutter, eased
the bit, and quieted the animal with a curious affectionate
gentleness.  After that the two became friends, in spite of the
fact that the Count's taste for horses and hunting took him into a
rather different set.  They played together in a cricket eleven of
novices called the "Cads of all Nations," who for a week of one
long vacation toured the Midlands, and were soundly beaten by every
village team.

There was a tough hardihood about the man which made Jaikie invite
him more than once to be his companion in some of his more risky
enterprises--invitations regretfully refused, for some business
always took Ashie home.  That home Jaikie knew to be in Eastern
Europe, but he had not associated him with Evallonia.  There was
also an extreme innocence.  He wanted to learn everything about
England, and took Jaikie as his mentor, believing that in him he
had found the greatest common measure of the British people.
Whether he learned much may be doubted, for Jaikie was too little
of a dogmatist to be a good instructor.  But they slipped into a
close friendship, and rubbed the corners off each other's minds.

"I know what I'm doing," said Ashie at last; "but I am not quite
sure where it will finish.  But that's a long story.  You're a
little devil, Jaikie, to come here at the tag-end of your holiday.
If you had come a month ago we might have had all sorts of fun."

He had relapsed into the manner of the undergraduate, but there was
something in him now which made it a little absurd.  For the figure
opposite Jaikie was not the agreeable and irresponsible companion
he had known.  Ashie looked desperately foreign, without a hint of
Cambridge and England; bigger too, more mature, and rather
formidable.  The thick dark eyebrows in combination with the fair
hair had hitherto given his appearance a touch of comedy; now the
same brows bent above the grey eyes had something in them martial
and commanding.  Rob Roy was more of a man on his native heath than
on the causeways of Glasgow.

"If you can arrange to stay here for a little," said Ashie, "I
promise to show you life."

"Thank you very much, but I can't.  I must be off home to-morrow--a
week's tramping, and then the train."

"Give me three weeks."

"I'm sorry, but I can't."  Jaikie found it hard to sort out his
feelings, but he was clear that he did not want to dally in
Evallonia.

Ashie's voice became almost magisterial.

"What are you doing here to-day?" he asked.

"I'm lunching with a friend and going back to Kremisch in the
evening."

"Who's your friend?"

"I'm not quite sure of his name."  Jaikie's caution told him that
Mr Glynde might have many aliases.  "He's in a circus."

Ashie laughed--almost in the old light-hearted way.  "Just the kind
of friend you'd have.  The Cirque Doré?  I saw some of the
mountebanks in the streets. . . .  You won't accept my invitation?
I can promise you the most stirring time in your life."

"I wish I could, but--well, it's no use, I can't."

"Then we must part, for I have a lot to do."

"You haven't told me what you're doing."

"No.  Some day I will--in England, if I ever come back to England."

He called one of his scouts, to whom he said something in a strange
tongue.  The latter saluted and waited for Jaikie to follow him.
Ashie gave him a perfunctory handshake--"Good-bye.  Good luck to
you"; and entered his tent.

The boy led Jaikie beyond the encampment, and, with a salute and a
long stare, left him at the entrance to the bridge.  A clock on a
steeple told him that it was a quarter-past twelve, pretty much the
time that Mr Glynde had appointed.  The bridge was almost empty,
for the sight-seers who had followed Ashie's outfit had trickled
back to their midday meals.  Jaikie spent a few minutes looking
over the parapet at the broad waters of the river.  This must be
the Rave, the famous stream which sixty miles on flowed through the
capital city of Melina.  He watched its strong current sweep past
the walls of the great Schloss, which there dropped sheer into it,
before in a wide circuit it formed the western boundary of the
castle park.  What an impregnable fortress, he thought, must have
been this House of the Four Winds in the days before artillery, and
how it must have lorded it over the little burgh under its skirts!

There was a gatehouse on the Tarta side of the bridge, an ancient
crumbling thing bright with advertisements of the Cirque Doré.
Beyond it a narrow street wound under the blank wall of the castle,
ending in a square in which the chief building was a baroque town-
house.  From where Jaikie stood this town-house had an odd
apologetic air, a squat thing dwarfed by the Schloss: like a
dachshund beside a mastiff.  The day was very warm, and he crossed
over from the glare of one side of the street to the shadow of the
other.  The place was almost empty, most of the citizens being
doubtless engaged with food behind shuttered windows.  Jaikie was
getting hungry, and so far he had looked in vain for Mr Glynde's
Luigi.  But as he moved towards the central square a man came out
of an entry, and, stopping suddenly to light a cigarette, almost
collided with him.  Jaikie saw a white cap and scarlet lettering,
and had a glimpse of gold earrings and a hairy face.  He remembered
his instructions.

"Can you show me the way to the Cirque Doré?" he asked.

The man grinned.  "I will lead you to a better restaurant," he said
in French with a villainous accent.  He held out his hand and shook
Jaikie's warmly, as if he had found a long-lost friend.  Then he
gripped him by the arm and poured forth a torrent of not very
intelligible praise of the excellence of the cuisine to which he
was guiding him.

Jaikie found himself hustled up the street and pulled inside a
little dark shop, which appeared to be a combination of a bird-
fancier's and a greengrocer's.  There was nobody there, so they
passed through it into a court strewn with decaying vegetables and
through a rickety door into a lane, also deserted.  After that they
seemed to thread mazes of mean streets at a pace which made the
sweat break on Jaikie's forehead, till they found themselves at the
other end of the town, where it ebbed away into shacks and market-
gardens.

"I am very hungry," said Jaikie, who saw his hopes of luncheon
disappearing.

"The Signor must have patience," was the answer.  "He has still a
little journey before him, but at the end of it he will have honest
food."

Luigi was an adept at under-statement.  He seemed to wish to escape
notice, which was easy at this stagnant hour of the day.  Whenever
anyone appeared he became still as a graven image, with an
arresting hand on Jaikie's arm.  They chose such cover as was
available, and any track they met they crossed circumspectly.  The
market-gardens gave place to vineyards, which were not easy to
thread, and then to wide fields of ripe barley, hot as the Sahara.
Jaikie was in good training, but this circus-man Luigi, though he
looked plump and soft, was also in no way distressed, never
slackening pace and never panting.  By and by they entered a wood
of saplings which gave them a slender shade.  At the far end of it
was a tall palisade of chestnut stakes, lichened and silvery with
age.  "Up with you," said Luigi, and gave Jaikie a back which
enabled him to grasp the top and swing himself over.  To his
annoyance the Italian followed him unaided, supple as a monkey.

"Rest and smoke," he said.  "There is now no reason for hurry
except the emptiness of your stomach."

They rested for ten minutes.  Behind them was the palisade they had
crossed, and in front of them glades of turf, and wildernesses of
fern and undergrowth, and groves of tall trees.  It was like the
New Forest, only on a bigger scale.

"It is a noble place," said Luigi, waving his cigarette.  "From
here it is seven miles to Zutpha, where is a railway.  Tarta in old
days was only, so to say, the farmyard behind the castle.  From
Zutpha the guests of the princes of this house were driven in great
coaches with outriders.  Now there are few guests, and instead of a
coach-and-eight a Ford car.  It is the way of the world."

When they resumed their journey it was at an easier pace.  They
bore to their left, and presently came in view of what had once
been a formal garden on a grandiose scale.  Runnels had been led
from the river, and there was a multitude of stone bridges and
classic statuary and rococo summer-houses.  Now the statues were
blotched with age, the bridges were crumbling, and the streams were
matted beds of rushes.  Beyond, rising from a flight of terraces,
could be seen the huge northern façade of the castle, as blank as
the side it showed to Tarta.  It had been altered and faced with a
white stone a century ago, but the comparative modernity of this
part made its desolation more conspicuous than that of the older
Gothic wings.  What should have been gay with flowers and sun-
blinds stood up in the sunlight as grim as a deserted factory; and
that, thought Jaikie, is grimmer than any other kind of ruin.

Luigi did not take him up the flights of empty terraces.  Beyond
the formal garden he turned along a weedy path which flanked a
little lake.  On one side was the Cyclopean masonry of the terrace
wall, and, where it bent at an angle, cloaked by a vast magnolia,
they came suddenly upon a little paved court shaded by a trellis.
It was cool, and it was heavily scented, for on one side was a
thicket of lemon verbena.  A table had been set for luncheon, and
at it sat two men, waited on by a foot-man in knee breeches and a
faded old coat of blue and silver.

"You are not five minutes behind time," said the elder of the two.
"Anton," he addressed the servant, "take the other gentleman
indoors and see to his refreshment." . . .  To Jaikie he held out
his hand.  "We have met before, Mr Galt.  I have the honour to
welcome you to my poor house.  Mr Glynde I think you already know."

"You expected me?" Jaikie asked in some surprise.

"I was pretty certain you would come," said Mr Glynde.

Jaikie saw before him that Prince Odalchini whom two years ago he
had known as one of the tenants of the Canonry shooting of
Knockraw.  The Prince's hair was a little greyer, his well-bred
face a little thinner, and his eyes a little darker round the rims.
But in the last burned the same fire of a gentle fanaticism.  He
was exquisitely dressed in a suit of white linen with a tailed
coat, and shirt and collar of turquoise-blue silk--blue and white
being the Odalchini liveries.  Mr Randal Glynde had shed the
fantastic garments of the previous night, but he had not returned
to the modishness of his English clothes; he wore an ill-cut suit
of some thin grey stuff that made him look like a commis-voyageur
in a smallish way of business, and to this part he had arranged his
hair and beard to conform.  To his outfit a Guards tie gave a touch
of startling colour.  "We will not talk till we have eaten," said
the Prince.  "Mr Galt must have picked up an appetite between here
and Kremisch."

Jaikie had one of the most satisfying meals of his career.  There
was an omelet, a dish of trout, and such peaches as he had never
tasted before.  He had acquired a fresh thirst during his journey
with Luigi, and this was assuaged by a white wine which seemed to
be itself scented with lemon verbena, a wine in slim bottles beaded
with the dew of the ice-cellar.  He was given a cup of coffee made
by the Prince's own hands, and a long fat cigarette of a brand
which the Prince had specially made for him in Cairo.

"Luigi spoke the truth," said Mr Glynde smiling, "when he said that
he would conduct you to a better restaurant."

The footman withdrew and silence fell.  Bees wandered among the
heliotrope and verbena and pots of sapphire agapanthus, and even
that shady place felt the hot breath of the summer noon.  Sleep
would undoubtedly have overtaken Jaikie and Mr Glynde, but for the
vigour of Prince Odalchini, who seemed, like a salamander, to draw
life and sustenance from the heat.  His high-pitched, rather
emotional voice kept his auditors wakeful.  "I will explain to
you," he told Jaikie, "what you cannot know or have only heard in a
perversion.  I take up the history of Evallonia after Prince John
sailed from your Scotch loch."

He took a long time over his exposition, and as he went on Jaikie
found his interest slowly awakening.  The cup of the abominations
of the Republican Government had apparently long ago been filled.
Evallonia was ready to spew them out, but unfortunately the
Monarchists were not quite ready to take their place.  This time it
was not trouble with other Powers or with the League of Nations.
Revolutions had become so much the fashion in Europe that they were
taken as inevitable, whether their purpose was republic, monarchy,
or dictatorship.  The world was too weary to argue about the merits
of constitutional types, and the nations were too cumbered with
perplexed economics to have any desire to meddle in the domestic
affairs of their neighbours.  Aforetime the Monarchists had feared
the intervention of the Powers or some finding of the League, and
therefore they had sought the mediation of British opinion.  Now
their troubles were of a wholly different kind.

Prince Odalchini explained.  Communism was for the moment a dead
cause in Evallonia, and Mastrovin and his friends had as much
chance of founding a Soviet republic as of plucking down the moon.
Mastrovin indeed dared not show himself in public, and the present
administration of his friends staggered along, corrupt,
incompetent, deeply unpopular.  It would collapse at the slightest
pressure.  But after that?

"Everywhere in the world," said the Prince, "there is now an
uprising of youth.  It does not know what it seeks.  It did not
know the hardships of war.  But it demands of life some hope and
horizon, and it is determined to have the ordering of things in its
hands.  It is conscious of its ignorance and lack of discipline, so
it seeks to inform and discipline itself, and therein lies its
danger."

"Ricci," he went on.  "You remember him in the Canonry?--a youngish
man like a horse-dealer.  At that time he was a close ally of the
Republican Government, but eighteen months ago he became estranged
from it--he and Count Jovian, who was not with the others in
Scotland.  Well, Ricci had an American wife of enormous wealth, and
with the aid of her money he set out to stir up our youth.  He had
an ally in the Jovian I have mentioned, who was a futile vain man,
like your Justice Shallow in Shakespeare, easily flattered and but
little respected, but with a quick brain for intrigue.  These two
laid the foundations of a body called Juventus, which is now the
strongest thing in Evallonia.  They themselves were rogues, but
they enlisted many honest helpers, and soon, like the man in the
Arabian Nights, they had raised a jinn which they could not
control.  Jovian died a year ago--he was always sick--and Ricci is
no longer the leader.  But the thing itself marches marvellously.
It has caught the imagination of our people and fired their pride.
Had we an election, the Juventus candidates would undoubtedly sweep
the board.  As it is, it contains all the best of Evallonian youth,
who give up to it their leisure, their ambition and their scanty
means.  It is in its way a noble thing, for it asks only for
sacrifice, and offers no bribes.  It is, so to speak, a new Society
of Jesus, sworn to utter obedience.  But, good or ill, it has most
damnably spiked the guns of us Royalists."

Jaikie asked why.

"Because it is arrogant, and demands that whatever is done for
Evallonia it alone shall do it.  The present Government must go,
and at once, for it is too gross a scandal.  If we delay, there
will be a blind revolution of the people themselves.  You will say--
let Juventus restore Prince John.  Juventus will do nothing of the
kind, since Prince John is not its own candidate.  If we restore
him, Juventus will become anti-Monarchist.  What then will it do?
I reply that it does not yet know, but there is a danger that it
may set up one of its own people as dictator.  That would be
tragic, for in the first place Evallonia does not need or desire a
dictator, being Monarchist by nature, and in the second place
Juventus does not want a dictatorship either.  It is Nationalist,
but not Fascist.  Yet the calamity may happen."

"Has Juventus any leader who could fill the bill?" Jaikie asked.

The Prince shook his head.  "I do not think so--therefore its
action would be only to destroy and obstruct, not to build.  Ricci
with his wife's millions is now discredited; they have used him and
cast him aside.  There are some of the very young with power I am
told--particularly a son of Jovian's."

"Is his name Paul?" Jaikie asked, and was told yes.

"I know him," he said.  "He was at Cambridge with me.  I have just
seen him, for about two hours ago he stood me a drink."

The Prince in his surprise upset the coffee-pot, and even the
sophisticated eyes of Mr Glynde opened a little wider.

"You know Paul Jovian?  That is miraculous, Mr Galt.  Will you
permit me to speak a word in private with Mr Glynde?  There are
some matters still too secret even for your friendly ears."

The two withdrew and left Jaikie alone in the alcove among bees and
butterflies and lemon verbena.  He was a little confused in his
mind, for after a solitary month he had suddenly strayed into a
place where he seemed to know rather too many people.  Embarrassing
people, all of whom pressed him to stay longer.  He did not much
like their country.  It was too hot for him, too scented and
airless.  He was not in the least interested in the domestic
affairs of Evallonia, either the cantrips of Ashie or the solemn
intrigues of the Prince.  It was not his world; that was a cool,
bracing upland a thousand miles away, for which he had begun to
feel acutely homesick.  Alison would soon be back in the Canonry,
and he must be there to meet her.  He felt that for the moment he
was fed up with foreign travel.

The two men returned, and sat down before him with an air of
purpose.

"Where did you find Count Paul?" the Prince asked.

"On the Kremisch side of the Tarta bridge.  He was going into camp
with a detachment of large-sized Boy Scouts."

"You know him well?"

"Pretty well.  We have been friends ever since his first year.  I
like him--at least I liked him at Cambridge, but here he seems a
rather different sort of person.  He wanted me to stay on in
Evallonia--to stay for three weeks."

The two exchanged glances.

"So!" said the Prince.  "And your answer?"

"I refused.  He didn't seem particularly well pleased."

"Mr Galt, we also make you that proposal.  Will you be my guest
here in Evallonia for a little--perhaps for three weeks--perhaps
longer?  I believe that you can be of incalculable value to an
honest cause.  I cannot promise success--that is not commanded by
mortals--but I can promise you an exciting life."

"That was what I said to you last night," said Mr Glynde smiling.
"My little stater would give you no guidance, but the fact that you
have ventured into Evallonia encourages me to hope."

Jaikie at the moment had no desire for excitement.  He felt limp
and drowsy and oppressed; the Prince's luncheon had been too good,
and this scented nook choked him; he wanted to be somewhere where
he could breathe fresh air.  Evallonia was wholly devoid of
attractions.

"I don't think so," he said.  "I'm tremendously honoured that you
should want me, but I shouldn't be any use to you, and I must get
home."

"You are not to be moved?" said Mr Glynde.

Jaikie shook his head.  "I've had enough of the continent of
Europe."

"I understand," said Mr Glynde.  "I too sometimes feel that
satiety, and think I must go home."  He turned to the Prince.  "I
doubt if we shall persuade Mr Galt.  I wish Casimir were here.
Where, by the way, is he?"

The Prince replied with a word which sounded to Jaikie like
"Unnutz," a word which woke a momentary interest in his lethargic
mind.

"What then do you propose to do?"  The Prince turned to him.

"Go back to Kremisch to-night, sleep there and set off home to-
morrow."

"What must be must be.  But I do not think it wise for you to start
yet awhile.  Let us go indoors, and I will show you some of the few
household gods which poverty has left me."

Jaikie spent an hour or two pleasantly in the cool chambers of the
great house.  The place was shabby but not neglected, and there
were treasures there which, judiciously placed on the market, might
well have restored the Odalchini fortunes.  He looked at long lines
of forbidding family portraits; at a little room so full of
masterpieces that it was a miniature Salle Carrée; at one of the
finest collections of armour in the world; and at a wonderful array
of sporting trophies, for the Odalchinis had been famous game-
shots.  He was given tea at a little table in the hall quite in the
English fashion.  But very soon he became restless.  The sun was
getting low, and he had a considerable distance to walk before
supper.

"You had better go first to the Cirque Doré," said Mr Glynde.
"There I will meet you, and show you the way out of the town.  You
have been in dangerous territory, Mr Galt, and must be circumspect
in leaving it.  No, we cannot go together.  I will take a different
road and meet you there.  Luigi will guide you.  You will cross the
park by the way you came, and Luigi will be waiting for you outside
the pale."

"I am sorry," said the Prince.  He shook hands with so regretful a
face, and his old eyes were so solemn that Jaikie had a moment of
compunction.  When he left the castle the cool of the evening was
beginning, and the twilight scents came freshly and pleasantly to
his nostrils.  This was a better place than he had thought, and he
felt more vigorous and enterprising.  He had the faintest twinge of
regret about his decision.  After all, there was nothing to call
him home, for there would be no Dickson McCunn there yet awhile,
and no Dougal, and perhaps no Alison.  But there would be the
Canonry, and he fixed his mind upon its delectable glens as he
retraced his path of the morning.  One of Jaikie's endowments was
an almost perfect instinct for direction, and he struck the high
chestnut pale pretty much at the spot where he had first crossed
it.

Getting over without Luigi's help was a difficult business, and,
Jaikie's energy being wholly employed in the task, he did not
trouble to prospect the land. . . .  He tumbled over the top and
dropped into what seemed to be a crowd of people.

Strong hands gripped him.  A cloth was skilfully wound round his
face, blinding his eyes and blanketing his voice.  Another wrapped
his arms to his side, and a third bound his legs.  He struggled,
but his sense of the physical superiority of his assailants was so
great that he soon gave it up; he was like a thin rabbit in the
clutch of an enormous gamekeeper.  Yet the hands were not unkindly,
and his bandages, though effective, were not painful.

He was carried swiftly along for a few minutes and then placed in
some kind of car.  Somebody sat down beside him.  The car was
started, and bumped for a little along very rough roads. . . .
Then it came to a highway and moved fast. . . .  Jaikie had by this
time collected his thoughts, and they were wrathful.  His first
alarm had gone, for he reflected that there was no one likely to
mean mischief to him.  He was pretty certain what had happened.
This was Prince Odalchini's way of detaining an unwilling guest.
Well, he would presently have a good deal to say to the Prince and
to Mr Glynde.

The car slowed down, and his companion, whoever he was, began with
deft hands to undo his bonds.  First he loosed his legs.  Then,
almost with the same movement, he released his arms and drew the
bandages from his face.  Then he snapped a switch which lit up
dimly the interior of the limousine in which the blinds had been
drawn.

Jaikie found himself looking at the embarrassed face of Ashie.



III


DIVERSIONS OF A MARIONETTE


I


Miss Alison Westwater dropped with a happy sigh beside a bed of
wild strawberries still wet with dew, and proceeded to make a
second breakfast.  It was still early morning--not quite seven
o'clock--but she had been walking ever since half-past five, when
she had broken her fast on a cup of coffee and a last-night's roll
provided by a friendly chambermaid.  She had left the highway,
which, switch-backing from valley to valley, took the traveller to
Italy, and had taken a forest track which after a mile or two among
pines came out on an upland meadow, and led to a ridge, the spur of
a high mountain, from which the kingdoms of the earth could be
surveyed.  The sky was not the pale turquoise bowl which in her own
country heralded a perfect summer day, but an intense sapphire; the
shadows were also blue, and the sunshine where it fell was a
blinding essential light without colour, so that the grass looked
like snowdrifts.  The air had an aromatic freshness which stung the
senses, and Alison drew great breaths of it till her throat was as
cold as if she had been drinking spring water.

This was her one satisfactory time in the day.  The rest of her
waking hours were devoted to a routine which seemed void alike of
mirth or reason.  Her father's neuritis had almost gone, but so had
his good humour, and it was a very peevish old gentleman that she
accompanied in pottering walks by the lake-side or in aimless motor
drives on blinding hot highways.  Lord Rhynns was particular about
his food, and the hotel cuisine did not please him, so he was in
the habit of sampling, without much success, whatever Unnutz
produced in the way of café and konditorei.  He was also particular
about his clothes, and since he dressed always in the elder fashion
of tight trousers, coloured waistcoat, stiff collar and four-in-
hand tie, he was generally warm and correspondingly irascible.  Her
mother did not appear till after midday, and required a good deal
of coddling, for, having been driven out of her accustomed beat,
she found herself short of acquaintances and quite unable to plan
out her days.  One curious consequence was that both, who had
habituated themselves to a life of Continental vagrancy, suddenly
began to long passionately for home.  His lordship remembered that
the shooting season would soon begin in the Canonry, and was full
of sad reminiscences of the exploits of his youth, while to her
ladyship came visions of the cool chambers and the smooth and
comforting ritual of Castle Gay.

"I am a marionette," Alison had written to Jaikie.  "I move at the
jerk of a string, and it isn't my parents that pull it.  It's this
ghastly place, which has invented a régime for the idle middle-
classes of six nations.  I defy even you to break loose from it.  I
do the same things and make the same remarks and wear the same
clothes every day at the proper hour.  I'm a marionette and so are
the other people--quite nice they are, and well-mannered, and
friendly, but as dead as salted herrings.  A good old-fashioned
bounder would be a welcome change.  Or a criminal."

As she sat on the moss she remembered this sentence--and something
else.  Unnutz was mainly villas and hotels, but there was an old
village as a nucleus--wooden houses built on piles on the lake
shore, and one or two narrow twisting streets with pumpkins drying
on the shingle roofs.  There was a bathing-place there very
different from the modish thing on the main promenade, a place
where you dived in a hut under a canvas curtain into deep green
water, and could swim out to some fantastic little rock islets.
She had managed once or twice to bathe there, and yesterday
afternoon she had slipped off for an hour and had had a long swim
by herself.  Coming back she had recognised in a corner of the old
village the first face of an acquaintance she had met since she
came to Unnutz.  Not an acquaintance exactly, for he had never seen
her.  But she remembered well the shaggy leonine head, the heavy
brows and the forward thrust of the jaw.  She had watched those
features two years ago during some agonised minutes in the library
of Castle Gay, till Mr Dickson McCunn had adroitly turned melodrama
into farce, and she was not likely to forget them.  She remembered
the name too--Mastrovin, the power behind the Republican Government
of Evallonia.  Had not Jaikie told her that he was the most
dangerous underground force in Europe?

What was this dynamic personage doing in a dull little Tirolese
health resort?  Was her wish to be granted, and their drab society
enlivened by a criminal?

The thought only flitted across her mind, for she had other things
to think about.  She must make the most of her holiday, for by
half-past ten she must be back to join her father in his petit
déjeuner on the hotel verandah.  Usually she had the whole hillside
to herself, but this morning she had seen a car on the road which
led to the high pastures.  It had been empty, standing at the foot
of one of the tracks which climbed upward through the pines.
Someone else had her taste for early mornings in the hills.  It had
annoyed her to think that her sanctuary was not inviolable.  She
hoped that the intruder, whoever he or she was, was short in the
wind and would not get higher than the wood.

She got up from her lair among the strawberries and wandered across
the meadow, where every now and then outcrops of rock stuck grey
noses through the flowers.  She had a drink out of an ice-cold
runnel.  She saw a crested tit, a bird which she had never met
before, and screwed her single field-glass into her eye to watch
its movements.  Also she saw a kite high up in the blue, and,
having only once in her life met that type of hawk, regarded him
with a lively interest.  Then she came to a little valley the top
of which was a ravine in the high rocks, and the bottom of which
was muffled in the woods.  There was a woodcutter's cottage here,
wonderfully hidden in a cleft, with the pines on three sides and
one side open to the hill.  Where Alison stood she looked down upon
it directly from above, and could observe the beginning if its
daily life.  She had been here before, and had seen an old woman,
who might have come out of Grimm, carrying pails of water from a
pool in the stream.

Now instead of the old woman there was a young man, presumably her
son.  He came slowly from the cottage and moved to the fringe of
the trees, where a path began its downhill course.  He possessed a
watch, for he twice consulted it, as if he were keeping an
appointment.  His clothes were the ordinary forester's--baggy
trousers of homespun, heavy iron-shod boots, and an aged velveteen
jacket with silver buttons.  He carried himself well, Alison
thought, better than most woodmen, who were apt to be round-
shouldered and slouching.

A second man came out of the wood--also a tall man, but dressed
very differently from the woodcutter, for he wore flannels and a
green Homburg hat.  "My motorist," thought Alison.  "He must know
something about the woods, for the way through them to this cottage
isn't easy to find."

The newcomer behaved oddly.  He took off his hat.  The woodcutter
gave him his hand and he bowed over it with extreme respect.  Then
the woodcutter slipped his arm in his and led him towards the
cottage.

Alison in her perch far above put the glass to her eye and got a
good view of the stranger.  There could be no mistake.  Two years
ago she had sat opposite him at dinner at Castle Gay and at
breakfast at Knockraw.  She recognised the fine shape of his head,
and the face which would have been classically perfect but for the
snub nose.  One did not easily forget Count Casimir Muresco.

But who was the other?  Noblemen with nine centuries of pedigree
behind them do not usually bow over the hands of foresters and
uncover their heads.  She could not see his face, for it was turned
away from her, but before the two entered the cottage she had no
doubt about his identity.  She was being given the back view of the
lawful monarch of Evallonia.

From that moment Alison's boredom vanished like dew in the sun.
She realised that she had stumbled upon the fringe of great
affairs.  What was it that Prince John had said to her at the
dinner at Maurice's?  That Unnutz was not a very good place for a
holiday that summer, that it might be unpleasant, but that, being
English, she would always be free to get away.  That could only
mean that something momentous was going to happen at Unnutz.  What
was Prince John doing disguised as a woodcutter in this remote
and secret hut? . . .  What was Count Casimir, architect of
revolutions, doing there so early in the morning?  Plots were being
hatched, thought the girl in a delicious tremor of excitement.  The
curtain was about to rise on the play, and, unknown to the actors,
she had a seat in a box.

And then suddenly she remembered the face she had seen the
afternoon before in the lakeside alley.  Mastrovin!  He was the
deadly enemy of Count Casimir and the Prince.  He must know, or
suspect, that the Prince was in the neighbourhood.  Casimir
probably knew nothing of Mastrovin's presence.  But she, Alison,
knew.  The thought solemnised her, for such knowledge is as much a
burden as a delight.

Her first impulse was to scramble down the hillside to the cottage,
break in on the conspirators, and tell them what she knew.  But she
did not move, for it occurred to her that she might be more useful,
and get more fun out of the business, if she remained silent.  She
waited for ten minutes till the two men appeared again.  This time
she had a good view of the woodcutter through her glass, and she
recognised the comely and rather heavy countenance of Prince John.
Casmir took a ceremonious leave and started down the track through
the forest.  Alison, who knew all the paths, followed him at a
higher level.  She wanted to discover whether or not his steps had
been dogged.

Alison had taught Jaikie many things, and he had repaid her by
instructing her in some of his own lore.  He had made her almost as
artful and silent a tracker as himself, and under his tuition she
had brought to a high pitch her own fine natural sense of
direction.  Like a swift shadow she flitted through the pines, now
on bare needle-strewn ground, now among tangles of rock and
whortleberry.  The route she took was almost parallel to Casimir's,
but now and then she had to make a circuit to avoid some rocky
dingle, and there were times when she had to cast back or cast
ahead to trace him.  It was rough going in parts, and since Casimir
showed a remarkable turn of speed she had sometimes to slither down
steeps and sometimes to run.  By and by came glimpses of the valley
below, and at last through a thinning of the pines she saw the last
twisting of the hill-path before it debouched on the highway.
Presently she saw the waiting car, and the tracker, being a little
ahead of the tracked, sank down among the whortleberries to await
events.

Casimir appeared, going warily, with an eye on the white strip of
high road.  It was still empty, for the Firnthal does not rise
early.  He reached the car, and examined it carefully, as if he
feared that someone might have tampered with it in his absence.
Satisfied, he took the driver's seat, backed on to the high road,
and set out in the direction of Italy.

Alison observed his doings with only half an eye, for between her
and the car she had seen something which demanded attention.  She
was now some two hundred yards above the road, and the ground
immediately below her was occupied by a little rock-fall much
overgrown with fern and scrub.  There was something among the
bushes which had not been put there by nature.  Her glass showed
her that that something was the head of a man.  It was a bare head,
with grizzled hair and one bald patch at the back, and she knew to
whom it belonged.  Mastrovin was not in Unnutz for the sake of the
excellent sulphur baths or the mountain air.

Alison slipped out of her lair and as noiselessly as she could
crawled to her right along the slope of the hill.  She struck the
path by which Casimir had descended, a path which was, so to speak,
the grand trunk road from the hills, and which a little higher
forked in several directions.  Waiting a moment to get her breath,
she made a hasty bouquet of some blue campanulas and sprigs of
whortleberry and then sauntered down the path, a little flushed, a
little untidy about the hair and wet about the shoes, but on the
whole a creditable specimen of early-rising vigorous maidenhood.

Mastrovin, when she came in sight of him, was descending the hill
and had already reached the high road.  He had covered his head
with a green hat, and wore a dark green suit of breeches and
Norfolk jacket, just like any other tourist in a mountain country.
Alison's whistling caught his ear, and at the foot of the track he
stopped to wait for her.

"Grüss Gott!" he said, forcing his harsh features into amiability.
"I have been looking for a friend.  Have you seen anyone--any man--
up in the woods?  My friend is tall and walks fast, and his clothes
are grey."

One of Alison's accomplishments was that she understood German
perfectly, and spoke it with fluency and a reasonable correctness.
But it occurred to her that it would not be wise to reveal this
talent; so she pretended to follow Mastrovin with difficulty and to
puzzle over one word, and she began to answer in the purest
Ollendorff.

"You are English?" he asked.  "Speak English, please.  I understand
it."

Alison obeyed.  She explained that she had indeed met a man in the
high woods, though she had not specially remarked his clothes.  She
had passed him, and thought that he must have returned soon after,
for she had not seen him on her way down.  She described minutely
the place of meeting--on the right-hand road at the main fork, near
the brow of the hill, and not far from the rock called the Wolf
Crag which looked down on Unnutz--precisely the opposite direction
from the woodcutter's hut.

Mastrovin thanked her with a flourish of his hat.  "I must now to
breakfast," he said.  "There is a gasthaus by the roadside where I
will await my friend, if he is not already there."


II


Usually the two miles to Unnutz were the one black spot in the
morning's walk, for they were flat and dusty and meant a return to
the house of bondage.  But to-day Alison was scarcely conscious of
them, for she was thinking hard, with a flutter at her heart which
was half-painful and half-pleasant.  Prince John was here in
retreat for some purpose, and Count Casimir was in touch with him;
that must mean that things were coming to a head in Evallonia.
Mastrovin, his bitterest enemy, was on the trail of Casimir, and
must know that Prince John was in the neighbourhood.  That meant
trouble.  Her false witness that morning might send Mastrovin on a
wild-goose chase to the wrong part of the forest, but it was very
certain that he must presently discover the Prince's hermitage.
The Prince and Casimir might suspect that their enemies were
looking for them, but they did not know that Mastrovin was in
Unnutz.  She alone knew that, and she must make use of her
knowledge.  Casimir had gone off in the direction of Italy;
therefore she must warn the Prince, and that must be done secretly
when she could be certain that she was not followed.  She had begun
to plan a midnight journey, for happily she had a room giving on a
balcony, from which it would be easy to reach the ground.  To her
surprise she found that she looked forward with no relish to the
prospect; if she had had company it would have been immense fun,
but, being alone, she felt only the weight of a heavy duty.  She
longed passionately for Jaikie.

Entering the hotel by a side door, she changed into something more
like the regulation toilet of Unnutz, and sought her father on the
verandah.  For once Lord Rhynns was in a good humour.

"A little late, my dear," he complained mildly.  "Yes, I have had a
better night.  I am beginning to hope that I have got even with my
accursed affliction."  Then, regarding his daughter with complacent
eyes, he became complimentary.  "You are really a very pretty girl,
Alison, though your clothes are not such as gentlewomen wore in my
young days."  With a surprising touch of sentiment he added, "You
are becoming very like my mother."

Taking advantage of her father's urbanity, Alison broached the
question of going home.

"Presently, my dear.  Another week, I think, should set me right.
Your mother is anxious to leave--a sudden craving for Scotland.  We
shall go for a little to Harriet at Castle Gay--she has been more
than kind about it, and Craw has behaved admirably.  I am told he
has the place very comfortable, and I have always found him conduct
himself like a gentleman.  Money, my dear.  Ample means are not
only the passport to the name of gentility, but they create the
thing itself.  In these days it is not easy for a pauper to
preserve his breeding.

"By the way," he continued, "some friends of ours arrived here this
morning.  They are breakfasting more elaborately than we are in the
salle-à-manger.  The Roylances.  Janet Roylance, you remember, was
old Cousin Alastair Raden's second girl."

"What!" Alison almost shrieked.  It was the best news she could
have got, for now she could share her burden of responsibility.  In
the regrettable absence of Jaikie the Roylances were easily the
next best.

"Yes," her father went on.  "They have been at Geneva, and have
come on here for a holiday.  Sir Archibald, they tell me, is making
a considerable name for himself in politics.  For a young man in
these days he certainly has creditable manners."

His lordship finished his coffee, and announced that he proposed to
go to his sitting-room till luncheon to write letters.  Alison
dutifully accompanied him thither, paid her respects to her mother,
who was also in a more cheerful mood, and then hastened downstairs.
In the big dining-room she found the pair she sought at a table in
one of the windows.  Alison flung herself upon Janet Roylance's
neck.

"You've finished breakfast?  Then come outdoors and smoke.  I know
a quiet corner beside the lake.  I must talk to you at once.  You
blessed angels have been sent by Heaven just at the right moment."

When they were seated where a little half-moon of shrubbery made an
enclave above the blue waters of the Waldersee, Sir Archie offered
Alison a cigarette.

"No, thank you.  I don't smoke.  If I did it would be a pipe, I'm
so sick of the cigarette-puffing hussy.  First of all, what brought
you two here?"

Sir Archie grinned.  "The Conference has adjourned till Bolivia
settles some nice point with Uruguay."

"We came," said Janet, "because we are free people with no plans
and we knew that you were here.  We thought we should find you
moribund with boredom, Allie, but you are radiant.  What has
happened?  Have the parents turned over a new leaf?"

"Papa is quite good and nearly well.  Mamma has actually begun to
crave for Scotland.  There's no trouble at present on the home
front.  But the foreign situation is ticklish.  This place is going
to be the scene of dark doings, and I can't cope with them alone.
That's why I hugged you like a bear.  Have you ever heard of
Evallonia?"

"I have," said Janet, "for I sometimes read the Craw Press."

"We've expected a revolution there," said Sir Archie, "any time
these last two years.  But something seems to have gone wrong with
the timing."

"Well, that has been seen to.  The blow-up must be nearly ready,
and it's going to start in this very place.  Listen to me very
carefully.  The story begins two years ago in Castle Gay."

Briefly but vigorously Alison told the tale of the raid on the
Canonry and the discomfiture by Jaikie and Dickson McCunn of
Mastrovin and his gang.  ("Jaikie?" said Sir Archie.  "That's the
little chap we saw with you at Maurice's?  I was in a scrap
alongside him years ago.  Janet knows the story.  Good stamp of
lad.")  She sketched the personalities of the three Royalists and
the six Republicans, and she touched lightly upon Prince John.  She
described the face seen the afternoon before in the old village,
and her sight that morning of the Prince and Casimir at the
woodcutter's hut.  The drama culminated in Mastrovin squatted like
a partridge in the scrub above Casimir's car.

"Mastrovin!" Sir Archie brooded.  "He was at Geneva as an
Evallonian delegate.  Wonderful face of its kind, but it would make
any English jury bring him in guilty of any crime without leaving
the box.  He was very civil to me.  I thought him a miscreant but a
sportsman, though I wouldn't like to meet him alone on a dark
night.  He looked the kind of chap who wasn't afraid of anything--
except the other Evallonian female.  You remember her, Janet?"

His wife laughed.  "Shall I ever forget her?  You never saw such a
girl, Allie.  A skin like clear amber, and eyes like topazes, and
the most wonderful dark hair.  She dressed always in bright scarlet
and somehow carried it off.  Archie, who as you know is a bit of a
falconer, remembered that in the seventeenth century there was a
hawk called the Blood-red Rook of Turkey, so we always called her
that.  She was a Countess Araminta Some-thing-or-other."

Alison's eyes opened.  "I know her--at least, I have met her.  She
was in London the season before last.  Her mother was English, I
think, and hence her name.  She rather scared me.  She wasn't a
delegate, was she?"

"No," said Archie.  "She held a watching brief for something.  I
can tell you she scared old Mastrovin.  He didn't like to be in the
same room with her, and he changed his hotel when she turned up at
it."

"Never mind the Blood-red Rook," said Alison.  "Mastrovin is our
problem.  I don't care a hoot for Evallonian politics, but having
once been on the Monarchist side I'm going to stick to it.
Evallonia is apparently at boiling-point.  The Monarchist cause
depends upon Prince John.  Mastrovin is for the Republic or
something still shadier, and therefore he is against Prince John.
That innocent doesn't know his enemy is about, and Casimir has gone
off in the direction of Italy.  Therefore we have got to do
something about it."

"What puzzles me," said Archie, "is what your Prince is doing in
Unnutz, which isn't exactly next door to Evallonia, and why he
should want to get himself up as a peasant?"

"It puzzles me, too, but that isn't the point.  It all shows that
things are getting warm in Evallonia.  What we have got to do is to
dig Prince John out of that hut before Mastrovin murders or kidnaps
him, and stow him away in some safer place.  I considered it rather
a heavy job for me alone, but is should be child's play for the
three of us.  Don't tell me you decline to play."

During the last few minutes of the conversation Archie's face had
been steadily brightening.

"Of course we'll play," he said.  "You can count us in, Alison, but
I'm getting very discreet in my old age, and I must think it over
pretty carefully.  It's a chancy business purloining princes,
however good your intentions may be.  The thing's easy enough, but
it's the follow-up that matters. . . .  Wait a second.  I've always
believed that the best hiding-place was just under the light.  What
about bringing him to this hotel to join our party?"

"As Prince John or as a woodcutter?" Janet asked.

"As neither," said Archie.  "My servant got 'flu in Geneva, and I
had to leave him behind.  How would the Prince fancy taking on the
job?  I can lend him some of my clothes.  Is he the merry class of
lad that likes a jape?"

The luncheon-gong boomed.  "We can talk about that later," said
Alison.  "Meanwhile, it's agreed that we three slip out of this
place after dark.  We'll take your car part of the way, and there's
a moon, and I can guide you the rest.  We daren't delay, for I'm
positive that this very night Mastrovin will get busy."

Sir Archie arose with mirth in his eye, patted his hair and squared
his shoulders.  A boy approached and handed him a telegram.

"It's from Bobby Despenser," he announced.  "The Conference has
resumed and he wants me back at once.  Well, he can whistle for
me."

He tore the flimsy into small pieces.

"Take notice, you two," he said, "that most unfortunately I have
not received Bobby's wire."


III


On the following morning three people sat down to a late breakfast
in a private sitting-room of the Hotel Kaiserin Augusta.  All three
were a little heavy about the eyes, as if their night's rest had
been broken, but in the air of each was a certain subdued
excitement and satisfaction.

"My new fellow is settling down nicely," said Sir Archie, helping
himself to his third cup of coffee.  "Answers smartly to the name
of McTavish.  Lucky I brought the real McTavish's passport with me.
Curious thing, but the passport photograph isn't unlike him, and he
has almost the same measurements.  I've put some sticking-plaster
above his left eye to correspond to the scar that McTavish got in
Mespot, and I've had a go at his hair with scissors--he objected
pretty strongly to that, by the way.  I've put him into my striped
blue flannel suit, which you could tell for English a mile away,
and given him a pair of my old brown shoes.  Thank God, he's just
about my size.  I'm going to buy him a black Homburg--the shops
here are full of them--and then he'll look the very model of a
gentleman's gentleman, who has had to supplement his London
wardrobe locally."

"But, Archie, he has the kind of face that you can't camouflage,"
said Janet.  "Anyone who knows him is bound to recognise him."

Her husband waved his hand.  "N'ayez pas peur, je m'en charge, as
old Perriot used to say at Geneva.  He won't be recognised, because
no one will expect him here.  He's in the wrong environment--under
the light, so to speak, which is the best sort of hiding-place.  He
won't go much out of doors, and I've got him a cubby-hole of a
bedroom up in the attics.  Not too comfortable, but Pretenders to
thrones must expect to rough it a bit.  He'll mess with the
servants, who are of every nationality on earth, and I've told him
to keep his mouth shut.  Like all royalties, he's a dab at
languages, and speaks English without an accent, but I'm teaching
him to give his words a Scotch twist.  He tumbled to it straight
off, and says 'Sirr' just like my old batman.  If anyone makes
trouble I've advised him to dot him one on the jaw in the best
British style.  He looks as if he could swing a good punch."

The small hours of the morning had been a stirring time for the
party.  They had left the hotel by Alison's verandah a little
before midnight, and in Archie's car had reached the foot of the
forest path, meeting no one on the road.  Then their way had become
difficult, for it was very dark among the pines, and Alison had
once or twice been at fault in her guiding.  The moon rose when
they were near the crest of the hill, and after that it had been
easy to find the road to the hut through the dew-drenched pastures.
There things marched fast.  There was pandemonium with two dogs,
quieted with difficulty by Alison, who had a genius for animals.
The old woman, who appeared with a stable-lantern, denied fiercely
that there was any occupant of the hut except herself, her husband
being dead these ten years and her only son gone over the mountains
to a wedding.  She was persuaded in the end by Alison's mention of
Count Casimir, and the three were admitted.

Then Prince John had appeared fully dressed, with what was
obviously a revolver in his pocket.  He recognised Alison and had
heard of Sir Archie, and things went more smoothly.  The news that
Mastrovin was on his trail obviously alarmed him, but he took a
long time to be convinced about the need for shifting his
residence.  Clearly he was a docile instrument in the hands of the
Monarchists, and hesitated to disobey their orders for fear of
spoiling their plan.  Things, it appeared, were all in train for a
revolution in Evallonia, at any moment he might be required to act,
and Unnutz had been selected as the council-chamber of the
conspirators.  On this point it took the united forces of the party
to persuade him, but in the end he saw reason.  Alison clinched the
matter.  "If Mastrovin and his friends get you, it's all up.  If
you come with us it may put a little grit in the wheels, but it
won't smash the machine.  Remember, sir, that these men are
desperate, and won't stick at trifles.  They were desperate two
years ago at Castle Gay, but now it is pretty well your life or
theirs, and it had better be theirs."

When he allowed himself to be convinced his spirits rose.  He was a
young man of humour, and approved of Sir Archie's proposal that he
should go to their hotel.  He liked the idea of taking the place of
the absent McTavish, and thought that he could fill the part.
There only remained to give instructions to the old woman.  If
anyone came inquiring, she was not to deny the existence of her
late guest, though she was to profess ignorance of who or what he
was.  Her story was to be that he had left the preceding afternoon
with his belongings on his back.  She did not know where he had
gone, but believed that it was over the mountains to the Vossthal,
since he had taken the path for the Vossjoch.

The journey back had been simple, though Alison had thought it wise
to make a considerable detour.  It had been slightly complicated by
the good manners of the Prince, since he persisted in offering
assistance to Janet and Alison, who needed it as little as a
chamois.  They had reached the hotel just before daybreak, and had
entered, they believed, without being observed.  That morning Sir
Archie had explained to the manager about the delayed arrival of
his servant, and the name of Angus McTavish had been duly entered
in the hotel books with the Roylances' party.

"And now," said Archie, "he's busy attending to my dress-clothes.
What says the Scriptures?  'Kings shall be thy ministers and queens
thy nursing mothers.'  We're getting up in the world, Janet.  I'm
going to raise a chauffeur's cap for him, and I want him to take
your parents, Alison, out in the car this afternoon to accustom the
neighbourhood to the sight of a new menial.  As for me, I propose
to pay another visit to the hut.  There's bound to have been
developments up that way, and we ought to keep in touch with them.
I'll be an innocent tourist out for a walk to observe birds."

"What worries me," said Janet, "is how we are going to keep the
Monarchists quiet.  We may have Count Casimir here any moment, and
that will give the show away."

"No, it won't.  I mean, he won't.  I left a letter for him which
will give him plenty to think about."

Janet set down her coffee-cup.  "What did you say in the letter?"
she demanded severely.

"McTavish wrote it--I only dictated the terms.  He quite saw the
sense of it.  It was by way of being a piteous cry for help.  It
said he had been pinched by Mastrovin and his gang, and appealed to
his friends to fly to his rescue.  Quite affecting it was.  You see
the scheme?  We've got to keep McTavish cool and quiet on the ice
till things develop.  If Casimir and his lot are looking for him in
Mastrovin's hands they won't trouble us.  If Mastrovin is being
hunted by Casimir he won't be able to hunt McTavish.  What you
might call a cancelling out of snags."

His wife frowned.  "I wonder if you've not been a little too
clever."

"Not a bit of it," was the cheerful answer.  "Ordinary horse sense.
As old Perriot said, 'N'ayez pas peur--'"

"Archie," said Janet, "if you quote that stuff again I shall fling
the coffee-pot at you."


IV


Sir Archie did not return till nine o'clock that evening, for he
had walked every step of the road and had several times lost his
way.  He refreshed himself in the sitting-room with sandwiches and
beer, while Janet and Alison had their after-dinner coffee.

"How did McTavish behave?" he asked Alison.

"Admirably.  He drives beautifully and both Papa and Mamma thought
he was Scotch.  The only mistake was that he treated us like
grandees, and held the door open with his cap in his hand.  How
about you?  You look as if you had been seeing life?"

"I've had a trying time," said Sir Archie, passing a hand through
his hair.  "There has been a bit of a row up at the hut.  No actual
violence, but a good deal of unpleasantness."

"Have you been fighting?" Janet asked, observing a long scratch on
her husband's sunburnt forehead.

"Oh, that scratch is nothing, only the flick of a branch.  But I've
been through considerable physical tribulation.  Wait till I get my
pipe lit and you'll have the whole story. . . .

"I reached the hut between four and five o'clock in what John
Bunyan calls a pelting heat.  Ye gods, but it was stuffy in the
pinewoods, and blistering hot on the open hillside!  I made pretty
good time, and arrived rather out of condition, for my right leg--
my game leg as was--wasn't quite functioning as it should.  Well,
there was the old woman, and in none too good a temper.  Poor soul,
she had been considerably chivvied since we last saw her.  It
seemed that we were just in time this morning, for Mastrovin and
his merry men turned up about an hour after we left.  It was a
mercy we didn't blunder into them in the wood, and a mercy that we
had the sense to hide the car a goodish distance from where the
track starts.  Mastrovin must have spent yesterday in sleuthing,
for he had the ground taped, and knew that McTavish had been in the
hut at supper.  He had three fellows with him, and they gave the
old lady a stiff time.  They didn't believe her yarn about McTavish
having started out for the Vossthal.  They ransacked every corner
of the place, and put in some fine detective work examining beds
and cupboards and dirty dishes, besides raking the outhouses and
beating the adjacent coverts.  In the end they decided that their
bird had flown and tried to terrorise the old lady into a
confession.  But she's a tough ancient, and by her account returned
them as good as they gave.  She wanted to know what concern her
great-nephew Franz was of theirs, poor Franz that had lost his
health working in Innsbruck and had come up into the hills to
recruit.  All their bullying couldn't shake her about great-nephew
Franz, and in the end they took themselves off, leaving her with a
very healthy dislike of the whole push.

"Then, very early this morning, Count Casimir turned up and got his
letter.  It put him in a great taking.  She said he grew as white
as a napkin, and he started to cross-examine her about the hour and
the manner of the pinching of McTavish.  That was where I had
fallen down, for I had forgotten to tell her what was in the
letter.  So she gave a very confused tale, for she described him as
going off with us, mentioning the women in the party, and she also
described Mastrovin's coming, and from what she said I gathered
that he got the two visits mixed up.  What specially worried him
was that Mastrovin should have had women with him, and he was very
keen to know what they were like.  I don't know how the old dame
described you two--I should have liked to hear her--but anyway, it
didn't do much to satisfy the Count.  She said that he kept walking
about biting his lips, and repeating a word that sounded like
'Mintha.'  After that he was in a hurry to be off, but before
leaving he gave her an address--I've written it down--with which
she was to communicate if she got any news.

"I was just straightening out the story for her--I thought it right
to get her mind clear--and explaining that we had got McTavish safe
and sound, but that it was imperative in his own interests that
Count Casimir should believe there had been dirty work, when what
do you think happened?  Mastrovin turned up, accompanied by a
fellow who looked like a Jew barber out of a job.  He didn't
recognise me and looked at me very old-fashioned.  I was sitting in
a low chair, and got up politely to greet him, w