wire to Oesterzee and he'll make trouble if
anything goes wrong. I still think you would have been wiser to humour
Rasta Bey.'

As I was leaving he gave me a telegram. 'Here's a wire for your
Captain Schenk.' I slipped the envelope in my pocket and went Out.

Schenk was pretty sick, so I left a note for him. At one o'clock I got
the train started, with a couple of German Landwehr in each truck and
Peter and I in a horse-box. Presently I remembered Schenk's telegram,
which still reposed in my pocket. I took it out and opened it, meaning
to wire it from the first station we stopped at. But I changed my mind
when I read it. It was from some official at Regensburg, asking him to
put under arrest and send back by the first boat a man called Brandt,
who was believed to have come aboard at Absthafen on the 30th of
December.

I whistled and showed it to Peter. The sooner we were at
Constantinople the better, and I prayed we would get there before the
fellow who sent this wire repeated it and got the commandant to send on
the message and have us held up at Chataldja. For my back had fairly
got stiffened about these munitions, and I was going to take any risk
to see them safely delivered to their proper owner. Peter couldn't
understand me at all. He still hankered after a grand destruction of
the lot somewhere down the railway. But then, this wasn't the line of
Peter's profession, and his pride was not at stake. We had a mortally
slow journey. It was bad enough in Bulgaria, but when we crossed the
frontier at a place called Mustafa Pasha we struck the real supineness
of the East. Happily I found a German officer there who had some
notion of hustling, and, after all, it was his interest to get the
stuff moved. It was the morning of the 16th, after Peter and I had
been living like pigs on black bread and condemned tin stuff, that we
came in sight of a blue sea on our right hand and knew we couldn't be
very far from the end.

It was jolly near the end in another sense. We stopped at a station
and were stretching our legs on the platform when I saw a familiar
figure approaching. It was Rasta, with half a dozen Turkish gendarmes.

I called Peter, and we clambered into the truck next our horse-box. I
had been half expecting some move like this and had made a plan.

The Turk swaggered up and addressed us. 'You can get back to
Rustchuk,' he said. 'I take over from you here. Hand me the papers.'

'Is this Chat