e sum----"

"Yours--if you do what I ask----" And he thrust the note into the old
man's fingers.

This bound the bargain.

CHAPTER XXIII

SCHLOSS SZOLNOK

The night and day which followed the terrible events in the house of the
Beg of Rataj were like an evil dream to Marishka Strahni. She slept, she
awoke, always to be hurried on by her relentless captors, too ill to
offer resistance or any effort to delay them. Hugh Renwick was dead. All
the other direful assurances as to her own fate were as nothing beside
that dreadful fact. And Goritz--the man who sat beside her--Hugh's
murderer! Fear--loathing--she seemed even too weak and ill for these,
lying for the first part of their long journey, inert and helpless. The
man beside her watched her furtively from time to time, venturing
attention and solicitude for her comfort, but she did not reply to his
questions or even look at him. At the house of Selim Ali she recovered
some of her strength, and again upon the following night, at a small inn
not far from the Serbian border, she fell into a deep sleep of
exhaustion, from which she was aroused with difficulty. The machine was
stopped frequently, and its occupants were questioned, but in each case
Captain Goritz produced papers from his pocket, which let them pass.
They were now well within the borders of Hungary, and as the girl grew
stronger, courage came, and with it the thought of escape. But in spite
of her apparent helplessness she was aware that her captors were
watching her carefully, permitting no conversation with anyone, locking
the doors of the rooms in which she slept, at the houses where they
stopped, and taking turns at keeping guard outside. But their very
precautions gave her an appreciation of the risks that they ran. She was
a prisoner in her own country. All those she passed upon the road were
her friends. She had only to make her identity known, and the object of
her captors, to gain her freedom. She was somewhere in eastern Hungary,
but just where she did not know. The chauffeur spoke the language
fluently, and Marishka's ignorance of it made her task more difficult.
But one night at an inn in a small village, she found a girl who spoke
German, and in a moment when the attention of her guards was relaxed,
she managed to make the girl understand, promising her a sum of money if
she would summon the police of the town, to whom Marishka would tell her
story. The girl agreed, and in the early m