"Twelve years, Excellency."
"Two years before I came here, eh?" In a flash he had solved the enigma. "It is as I imagined. Have you the papers with you?"
"Yes, Excellency."
"May I see them?"
"They are my personal property, remember."
"How long ago did you get them?"
"Fifteen years ago the eighth of August. That was before I joined the secret police. The owner had died and it took some clever work to gain possession of them."
"How did you know of their existence?"
"It was an accident." Kolinsky answered haltingly.
"And your candidate for the crown?" asked the Russian in a slight tone of derision.
"Is a Parisian artist. A good-natured fool." Kolinsky's tone of voice echoed the other's, whose hand was held out hesitatingly across the table for the papers. Deliberately Josef drew a bundle from his inside pocket and opened it before his chief.
The parchments were old and the Latin was in an ancient cramped hand while the impression of the seal was well-nigh obliterated. When sufficient time had elapsed for the Russian to make a complete mental note of their appearance, Josef drew the papers away from him, refolded them carefully and replaced them in his pocket.
"Kolinsky, you know what will happen should you desert us when once in Krovitch?"
Josef was standing near the door. He smiled with supreme indifference.
"Do I get the mission, Excellency?" was the only reply he vouchsafed.
"Y-e-s." The superior's single acquiescence was prolonged into three syllables, urged by the acknowledged supreme ability of Kolinsky and restrained by a fear of apprehended duplicity.
Aware of this struggle the clever fellow turned back in the doorway to laugh at the other's perplexity.
"Really, Excellency, you have only one thing to fear." His chief started up suspiciously.
"What is that?" he asked tersely.
"That I may decide to claim the throne of Krovitch myself," Josef replied, as with his habitual smile he softly closed the door and hurried from the house.
IV
THE GRAY MAN
"Do you realize, Carrick, that three weeks have passed since I proposed this trip to Krovitch?" They were whirling along a badly kept road in that province of Russia as Calvert Carter made the above remark which was also an interrogation. The place of their debarkation had been an unusual one – Danzig – chosen because it had been the more accessible to the Russian frontier. Slowing down the automobile for obvious reasons, Carrick turned a ruminating expression in the direction of his master.
"Seems yesterday, sir."
"How's the go-fever? Still working?"
Carrick laughed. "Overtime, sir. Hundred miles an hour till we get there wouldn't be too fast for me." He turned his attention again to the machine and the rutty way before him.
The other drew out a road map which he consulted with trained eyes that correctly approximated both locality and distances. Slowly refolding it he replaced it in an inner pocket. Being in a mood that anticipated much at the end of the journey, he was not loath to break into his chauffeur's taciturnity.
"Well, cheer up. Even at this rate we ought to make Schallberg by sunset. It's eight o'clock now."
"Seems more than an hour since I 'ad my breakfast."
"I know, but no man's stomach is a safe timepiece, Carrick. On the road I could name at least six meal times by that organ of mine."
For a few miles the jolting of the machine over rough places punctuated their progress with a conversational hiatus.
The rarely occasional peasants working in the fields or plodding along the way, paused in their occupations to regard the novel vehicle with stolid wonderment.
"Seems odd, sir," hazarded Carrick when a comparatively smooth piece of road permitted more than monosyllabic profanity, "seems odd that we've seen ten women to one man so far. These are all 'has beens.' No young chaps workin' in the fields. What do you make of it, sir?"
"The ones not already drafted for Manchuria are dodging Russian conscription most likely."
"Think so, sir?" Carrick's tone raised a question.
"Why? Don't you?"
"Oh, I don't know, sir. They've all taken it on the run for some reason or other. Maybe the Krovitch army is already mobilized."
"Egad, Carrick, that is a possibility. I never thought of that. Suppose I expected them to wait for us. We don't want to miss the opening gun. Hump her up for all she's worth. Full speed and never mind the jolts."
The chauffeur bent readily to the task and their further advance into the country of their hopes was such that boded ill to any bewildered fowl that might recklessly seek to cross in front of them. The dial indicated seventy miles an hour.
"Suppose this were Fifth Avenue." Carter bent over to assure himself of the speed as he spoke.
"Umph. We won't go into that, sir. Too 'arrowing to think of. You'd have to mortgage everything to pye the fines. Any'ow you'd go into bankruptcy after you'd bailed me out." Carrick paused to view the route before them. "That's a pretty steep 'ill a'ead, sir. Mybe we'd better stop at the top and reconnoitre a bit. We ought to get a good view from there. It looks too bloomin' rocky for this rate any'ow."
"Where are the glasses?" inquired his companion with unconcealed eagerness, fumbling about in the locker beneath the seat. "Never mind, I have them," he said, producing the binoculars.
At the crest of the Here they stopped to view the panorama of the Beyond.
From the height on which they halted, they looked out upon a wilderness of which they had no previous conception, for the hill they had just ascended had masked it from view.
Below them, at a distance of about two miles, as far as the eye could see from left to right stretched a black and dense forest of unknown antiquity. Behind and beyond it at increasing distances peak upon lofty peak, mountain after mountain, like Babel, reached upward for the sky. Of these the one nearest and directly in front of the knights errant claimed attention.
"Looks like a giant coal scuttle, sir," said Carrick the trite. The description was apt, for the freak of nature which confronted them. Towering high above its neighbors this mountain was unusual. Some outraged Titan in his ire had, in some long-forgotten æon, apparently seized and turned upon its head the top-heavy crest, whose form roughly speaking was of a reversed truncated cone. Upon the wide plateau at the top, with battlemented walls and towers outlined against a turquoise sky, stood a high pitched castle whose topmost turrets seemed suspended from the heavens above them.
"Can you myke out the flag, sir?" Carrick asked anxiously, seeing that his master was viewing the donjon critically through the glasses.
Much depended on the nationality of the standard, which, hardly visible at that distance, was only discernible as a blur upon the blue of the otherwise immaculate sky. The castle undoubtedly commanded that highway on the far side of the wood along which they must pass. Carter had descended into the road and was eagerly adjusting the focus for a better view.
"Can't make it out exactly. It's not Russian for one thing. Field's red. Device is blue. Dragon or something. Have to take a chance till we get a nearer look."
Carrick, meanwhile, was peering intently down the road ahead of him where it disappeared into the midnight gloom of the forest. His alert eyes had noted two or three objects emerge from among the trees and stop.
"Look there, sir," and his outstretched arm indicated the direction while Carter swung his glasses around to the place.
"Videttes," he exclaimed without looking up. "Sizing us up through glasses, eh?"
"Russians?" The chauffeur's excitement was manifest, for he was frowning in a vain endeavor to discern