eliant as Dick Warner really was, he felt a good deal
better when he emerged from Consul Denniston's office than when he had
been trying to get by the barrier of clerks fifteen minutes earlier.
Then he had been a good many thousand miles from home, and not only
friendless in a strange and alien country, but possessed of a determined
and unscrupulous enemy as well. He had told only the truth about Hallo,
but he did not know everything, by any means, about the rich Hungarian
who had cheated his widowed mother.

He had not been very long in Semlin, however, without making the
discovery that here, in the old Hungarian town that faced the capital of
Servia across the river Save, Mike Hallo was a far more important person
than he had ever been in New York. The firm of Warner and Hallo had been
a good, sound one in New York, and both partners had been comfortably
well off. But in Semlin means that had not seemed very great in New York
made a man the equivalent of a millionaire in America. Hallo lived in
one of the finest houses of the city, and seemed to be looked up to and
respected.

"Gee!" Dick had said to himself. "They seem to think as much of him here
as people in New York do of J. P. Morgan or Andy Carnegie!"

Dick was boarding in Semlin. The extravagance of a hotel, he felt, was
not for him. He had a considerable sum of money, which he always carried
with him, in gold, wrapped in a belt, which never left him, but he knew
this money might have to last him a long time, and if he could help it
he was certainly not going to have to seek charity to get home. He
wanted to paddle his own canoe; that was his favorite motto.

Dick hadn't seen Mike Hallo, to speak to him, since he had come to
Semlin. He had seen him at a distance when Mike had been driving in an
open carriage, and Mike had seen him, too. Dick had caught the flush on
the sallow cheeks, and the look of hate that had sprung into his
father's partner's narrow, beady eyes. Oh, yes, Mike knew he was in
Semlin! And Dick did not underestimate the man's cleverness. It was just
as sure as it could be that Hallo understood very well why he had come
and what he hoped to do. Dick had tried to follow Mike's thoughts, too.

"He's a crook--he cheated my mother," Dick had said to himself. "And any
man who would do a thing like that has got a yellow streak in him a mile
wide. So it's a cinch he's afraid of me. He may think I can't do
anything to hurt him, and all that, but he