y,
but in the old days men had gone alone through a world of dangers to the
Holy Sepulchre and had returned. He was not far from the path taken by
those from Western Europe, and he was uplifted by the knowledge. The
feeling that he, too, was a crusader grew strongly upon him, and by
night and day was his support.

He crossed the border at last and came to Salzburg in the mountains,
where the gray-green Salzach flows down from the glaciers and divides
the town. The place was thronged with soldiers, and the summit of the
frowning Muenchburg was alive with activity. Here in the very heart of
the Teutonic confederation, far from hostile frontiers, travelers were
not subjected to such rigid scrutiny. It was deemed that everything was
safely German, and John could travel at ease almost like an inhabitant
of the land.

Salzburg looked familiar to him. There had been much to photograph it
upon his mind. He remembered the uneasy night he and his uncle had
passed there before his flight with Lannes, which had taken him into
such a train of vast events. It had been only seven or eight months
before but it seemed many times as long. He had felt himself a boy in
Vienna, he felt himself a man now. He had been through great battles,
he had seen the world in convulsion, his life a dozen times had hung on
a hair, and since it is experience that makes a man he was older than
most of those twice his age.

He was stopping after his custom at an obscure inn, and in the moonlight
he strolled through the little city. In its place among the mountains on
both sides of the gray-green river it was full of romance to him,
romance colored all the more deeply by memory. Off there among those
peaks the _Arrow_ had first come for him and Lannes, while here the
great Mozart had been born and lay buried. In remoter days Huns had
swept through these passes, coming from Asian deserts to the pillage of
Europe.

John sat down on a bench in the little square before the cathedral and
looked up at the mountains. He knew the exact location in which lay
Zillenstein, the ancient seat of the Auersperg race, and he calculated
that in two days he could reach it on foot, the lone youth in peasant's
garb, pursuing the powerful prince and general, surrounded by retainers
and hussars and in the land of his ancestors.

John wondered what had become of his comrades. Was Lannes well, and had
he got his message? Were Carstairs and Wharton still alive, and where
was W