“I’ll see him,” said the other promptly, as if he were granting the audience.
He followed the perplexed attendant up the grand staircase, across thickly carpeted halls in which posed statuesque soldiers of the Royal Guard, to the door of the Prince’s bedchamber. Here he was confronted by Count Vos Engo.
“Enter,” said Vos Engo, with very poor grace, standing aside. The sentinels grounded their arms and Truxton King passed into the royal chamber, alone.
CHAPTER XX
BY THE WATER-GATE
It was a vast, lofty apartment, regal in its subdued lights. An enormous, golden bed with gorgeous hangings stood far down the room. So huge was this royal couch that Truxton at first overlooked the figure sitting bolt upright in the middle of it. The tiny occupant called out in a very sleepy voice:
“Here I am, Mr. King. Gee, I hate a bed as big as this. They just make me sleep in it.”
An old woman advanced from the head of the couch and motioned Truxton to approach.
“I am deeply honoured, your Highness,” said the visitor, bowing very low. Through the windows he could see motionless soldiers standing guard in the balcony.
“Come over here, Mr. King. Nurse won’t let me get up. Excuse my nighty, will you, please? I’m to have pajamas next winter.”
Truxton advanced to the side of the bed. His eyes had swept the room in search of the one person he wanted most to see of all in the world. An old male servitor was drawing the curtains at the lower end of the room. There was no one else there, except the nurse. They seemed as much a part of the furnishings of this room as if they had been fixtures from the beginning.
“I am sure you will like them,” said Truxton, wondering whether she were divinely secreted in one of the great, heavily draped window recesses. She had been in this room but recently. A subtle, delicate, enchanting perfume that he had noticed earlier in the evening—ah, he would never forget it.
The Prince’s legs were now hanging over the edge of the bed. His eyes were dancing with excitement; sleep was momentarily routed.
“Say, Mr. King, I wish I was going with you to find Uncle Jack. You will find him, won’t you? I’m going to say it in my prayers tonight and every night. They won’t hardly let me leave this room. It’s rotten luck. I want to fight, too.”
“We are all fighting for you, Prince Robin.”
“I want you to find Uncle Jack, Mr. King,” went on Bobby eagerly. “And tell him I didn’t mean it when I banished him the other day. I really and truly didn’t.” He was having difficulty in keeping back the tears.
“I shall deliver the message, your Highness,” said Truxton, his heart going out to the unhappy youngster. “Rest assured of that, please. Go to sleep and dream that I have found him and am bringing him back to you. The dream will come true.”
“Are you sure?” brightening perceptibly.
“Positively.”
“Americans always do what they say they will,” said the boy, his eyes snapping. “Here’s something for you to take with you, Mr. King. It’s my lucky stone. It always gives good luck. Of course, you must promise to bring it back to me. It’s an omen.”
He unclasped his small fingers; in the damp palm lay one of those peculiarly milky, half-transparent pebbles, common the world over and of value only to small, impressionable boys. Truxton accepted it with profound gravity.
“I found it last 4th of July, when we were celebrating out there in the park. I’m always going to have a 4th of July here. Don’t you lose it, Mr. King, and you’ll have good luck. Baron Dangloss says it’s the luckiest kind of a stone. And when you come back, Mr. King, I’m going to knight you. I’d do it now, only Aunt Loraine says you’d be worrying about your title all the time and might be ’stracted from your mission. I’m going to make a baron of you. That’s higher than a count in Graustark. Vos Engo is only a count.”
Truxton started. He looked narrowly into the frank, engaging eyes of the boy in the nighty.
“I shall be overwhelmed,” he said. Then his hand went to his mouth in the vain effort to cover the smile that played there.
“My mother used to say that American girls liked titles,” said the Prince with ingenuous candor.
“Yes?” He hoped that she was eavesdropping.
“Nurse said that I was not to keep you long, Mr. King,” said the Prince ruefully. “I suppose you are very busy getting ready. I just wanted to give you my lucky stone and tell you about being a baron. I won’t have any luck till you come back. Tell Mr. Hobbs I’m thinking of making him a count. You’re awful brave, Mr. King.”
“Thank you, Prince Robin. May I—” he glanced uneasily at the distant nurse—”may I ask how your Aunt Loraine is feeling?”
“She acted very funny when I sent for you. I’m worried about her.”
“What did she do, your Highness?”
“She rushed off to her room. I think, Mr. King, she was getting ready to cry or something. You see, she’s in trouble.”
“In trouble?”
“Yes. I can’t tell you about it.”
“She’s worried about her brother, of course—and you.”
“I just wish I could tell you—no, I won’t. It wouldn’t be fair,” Bobby said, checking himself resolutely. “She’s awful proud of you. I’m sure she likes you, Mr. King.”
“I’m very, very glad to hear that.”
Bobby had great difficulty in keeping his most secret impressions to himself. In fact, he floundered painfully in an attack on diplomacy.
“You should have seen her when Uncle Caspar came in to say you were going off to find her brother. She cried. Yes, sir, she did. She kissed me and—but you don’t like to hear silly things about girls, do you? Great big men never do.”
“I’ve heard enough to make me want to do something very silly myself,” said Truxton, radiant. “I—I don’t suppose I could—er—see your Aunt Loraine for a few minutes?”
“I think not. She said she just—now, you mustn’t mind her, Mr. King—she just couldn’t bear it, that’s all. She told me to say she’d pray for you and—Oh, Mr. King, I do hope she won’t marry that other man!”
Truxton bent his knee. “Your Highness, as it seems I am not to see her, and as you seem to be the very best friend I have, I should very much like to ask a great favour of you. Will you take this old ring of mine and wish it on her finger just as soon as I have left your presence?”
“How did you know she was coming in again?” in wide-eyed wonder. “Excuse me. I shouldn’t ask questions. What shall I wish?” It was the old ring that had come from Spantz’s shop. The Prince promptly hid it beneath the pillow.
“I’ll leave that to you, my best of friends.”
“I bet it’ll be a good wish, all right. I know what to wish.”
“I believe you do. Would you mind giving her something else from me?” He hesitated before venturing the second request. Then, overswept by a warm, sweet impulse, he stepped forward, took the boy’s face between his eager hands, and pressed a kiss upon his forehead. “Give her that for me, will you, Prince Robin Goodfellow.”
Bobby beamed. “But I never kiss her there!”
“I shall be ten thousand times obliged, your Highness, if you will deliver it in the usual place.”
“I’ll do it!” almost shouted the Prince. Then he clapped his hand over his mouth and looked, pop-eyed with apprehension, toward the nurse.
“Then, good-bye and God bless you,” said Truxton. “I must be off. Your Uncle Jack is waiting for me, up there in the hills.”
Bobby’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Mr. King, please give him my love and make him hurry back. I—I need him awful!”
Truxton found Mr. Hobbs in a state bordering on collapse.
“I say, Mr. King, it’s all right to say we’ll go, but how the deuce are we to do it? My word, there’s no more chance of getting out of the—”
“Listen, Hobbs: we’re going to swim out,” said Truxton. He was engaged in stuffing food in
to a knapsack. Colonel Quinnox and Haddan had been listening to Hobbs’s lamentations for half an hour, in King’s room.
“Swim? Oh, I say! By hokey, he’s gone clean daffy!” Hobbs was eyeing him with alarm. The others looked hard at the speaker, scenting a joke.
“Not yet, Hobbs. Later on, perhaps. I had occasion to make a short tour of investigation this afternoon. Doubtless, gentlemen, you know where the water-gate is, back of the Castle. Well, I’ve looked it over—and under, I might say. Hobbs, you and I will sneak under those slippery old gates like a couple of eels. I forgot to ask if you can swim.”
“To be sure I can. Under the gates? My word!”
“Simple as rolling off a log,” said Truxton carelessly. “The Cascades and Basin of Venus run out through the gate. There is a space of at least a foot below the bottom of the gate, which hasn’t been opened in fifty years, I’m told. A good swimmer can wriggle through, d’ye see? That lets him out into the little canal that connects with the river. Then—”
“I see!” cried Quinnox. “It can be done! No one will be watching at that point.”
The sky was overcast, the night as black as ebony. The four men left the officers’ quarters at one o’clock, making their way to the historic old gate in the glen below the Castle. Arriving at the wall, Truxton briefly whispered his plans.
“You remember, Colonel Quinnox, that the stream is four or five feet deep here at the gate. The current has washed a deeper channel under the iron-bound timbers. The gates are perhaps two feet thick. For something like seven or eight feet from the bottom they are so constructed that the water runs through an open network of great iron bars. Now, Hobbs and I will go under the gates in the old-clothes you have given us. When we are on the opposite side we’ll stick close by the gate, and you may pass our dry clothes out between the bars above the surface of the water. Our guns, the map and the food, as well. It’s very simple. Then we’ll drop down the canal a short distance and change our clothes in the underbrush. Hobbs knows where we can procure horses and he knows a trusty guide on the other side of the city. So long, Colonel. I’ll see you later.”
“God be with you,” said Quinnox fervently. The four men shook hands and King slipped into the water without a moment’s hesitation.
“Right after me, Hobbs,” he said, and then his head went under.
A minute later he and Hobbs were on the outside of the gate, gasping for breath. Standing in water to their necks, Quinnox and Haddan passed the equipment through the barred openings. There were whispered good-byes and then two invisible heads bobbed off in the night, wading in the swift-flowing canal, up to their chins. Swimming would have been dangerous, on account of the noise.
Holding their belongings high above their heads, with their hearts in their mouths, King and the Englishman felt their way carefully along the bed of the stream. Not a sound was to be heard, except the barking of dogs in the distance. The stillness of death hung over the land. So still, that the almost imperceptible sounds they made in breathing and moving seemed like great volumes of noise in their tense ears.
A hundred yards from the gate they crawled ashore and made their way up over the steep bank into the thick, wild underbrush. Not a word had been spoken up to this time.
“Quietly now, Hobbs. Let us get out of these duds. ’Gad, they’re like ice. From now on, Hobbs, you lead the way. I’ll do my customary act of following.”
Hobbs was shivering from the cold. “I say, Mr. King, you’re a wonder, that’s wot you are. Think of going under those bally gates!”
“That’s right, Hobbs, think of it, but don’t talk.”
They stealthily stripped themselves of the wet garments, and, after no end of trouble, succeeded in getting into the dry substitutes. Then they lowered the wet bundles into the water and quietly stole off through the brush, Hobbs in the lead, intent upon striking the King’s Highway, a mile or two above town. It was slow, arduous going, because of the extreme caution required. A wide detour was made by the canny Hobbs—wider, in fact, than the impatient American thought wholly necessary. In time, however, they came to the Highway.
“Well, we’ve got a start, Hobbs. We’ll win out, just as I said we would. Easy as falling off a log.”
“I’m not so blooming sure of that,” said Hobbs. He was recalling a recent flight along this very road. “We’re a long way from being out of the woods.”
“Don’t be a kill-joy, Hobbs. Look at the bright side of things.”
“I’ll do that in the morning, when the sun’s up,” said Hobbs, with a sigh. “Come along, sir. We take this path here for the upper road. It’s a good two hours’ walk up the mountain to Rabot’s, where we get the horses.”
All the way up the black, narrow mountain path Hobbs kept the lead. King followed, his thoughts divided between the blackness ahead and the single, steady light in a certain window now far behind. He had seen the lighted window in the upper balcony as he passed the Castle on the way to the gate. Somehow he knew she was there saying good-bye and Godspeed to him.
At four o’clock, as the sun reached up with his long, red fingers from behind the Monastery mountain, Truxton King and Hobbs rode away from Rabot’s cottage high in the hills, refreshed and sound of heart. Rabot’s son rode with them, a sturdy, loyal lad, who had leaped joyously at the chance to serve his Prince. Undisturbed, they rode straight for the passes below St. Valentine’s. Behind and below them lay the sleeping, restless, unhappy city of Edelweiss, with closed gates and unfriendly, sullen walls. There reigned the darkest fiend that Graustark, in all her history, had ever come to know.
Truxton King had slipped through his fingers with almost ridiculous ease. So simple had it been, that the two messengers, gloating in the prospect ahead, now spoke of the experience as if it were the most trivial thing in their lives. They mentioned it casually; that was all.
Now, let us turn to John Tullis and his quest in the hills. It goes without saying that he found no trace of his sister or her abductors. For five days he scoured the lonely, mysterious mountains, dragging the tired but loyal hundred about at his heels, distracted by fear and anguish over the possible fate of the adored one. On the fifth day, a large force of Dawsbergen soldiers, led by Prince Dantan himself, found the fagged, disspirited American and his half-starved men encamped in a rocky defile in the heart of the wilderness.
That same night a Graustark mountaineer passed the sentinels and brought news of the disturbance in Edelweiss. He could give no details. He only knew that there had been serious rioting in the streets and that the gates were closed against all comers. He could not tell whether the rioters—most of whom he took to be strikers, had been subdued or whether mob-law prevailed. He had been asked to cast his lot with the strikers, but had refused. For this he was driven away from his home, which was burned. His wife and child were now at the Monastery, where many persons had taken refuge.
In a flash it occurred to John Tullis that Marlanx was at the bottom of this deviltry. The abduction of Loraine was a part of his plan! Prince Dantan advised a speedy return to the city. His men were at the command of the American. Moreover, the Prince himself decided to accompany the troops.
Before sunrise, the command, now five or six hundred strong, was picking its way down the dangerous mountain roads toward the main highway. Fifteen miles below Edelweiss they came upon the company of soldiers sent out to preserve order in the railroad camps.
The officer in charge exhibited a document, given under the hand and seal of Baron Dangloss, directing him to remain in command of the camps until the strikers, who were unruly, could be induced to resume work once more. This order, of course, was a forgery, designed to mislead the little force until Marlanx saw fit to expose his hand to the world. It had come by messenger on the very day of the rioting. The messenger brought the casual word that the government was arresting and punishing the lawless, and that complete order would hardly be established for several days at the outside. He went so far as to admit that an attempt on t
he life of the Prince had failed. Other reports had come to the camps, and all had been to the effect that the rioting was over. The strikers, it seemed, were coming to terms with their employers and would soon take up the work of construction once more. All this sufficed to keep the real situation from reaching the notice of the young captain; he was obeying orders and awaiting the return of the workmen.
The relief that swept into the souls of the newly arrived company was short-lived. They had gone into camp, tired, sore and hungry, and were preparing to take a long needed rest before taking up the last stage of their march toward the city. John Tullis was now in feverish haste to reach the city, where at least he might find a communication from the miscreants, demanding ransom. He had made up his mind to pay whatever they asked. Down in his heart, however, there was a restless fear that she had not fallen into the hands of ordinary bandits. He could not banish the sickening dread that she was in the power of Marlanx, to whom she alone could pay the ransom exacted.
Hardly had the men thrown themselves from their horses when the sound of shooting in the distance struck their ears. Instantly the entire force was alert. A dozen shots were fired in rapid succession; then single reports far apart. The steady beat of horses’ feet was now plain to the attentive company. There was a quick, incisive call to arms; a squad stood ready for action. The clatter of hoofs drew nearer; a small group of horsemen came thundering down the defile. Three minutes after the firing was first heard, sentries threw their rifles to their shoulders and blocked the approach of the riders.
A wild, glad shout went up from the foremost horseman. He had pulled his beast to its haunches almost at the muzzles of the guns.
“Tullis!” he shouted, waving his hat.
John Tullis ran toward the excited group in the road. He saw three men, one of whom was shouting his name with all the power in his lungs.
“Thank God, we’ve found you!” cried the horseman, swinging to the ground despite the proximity of strange rifles. “Put up your guns! We’re friends!”
“King!” exclaimed Tullis, suddenly recognising him. A moment later they were clasping hands.
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories Page 101