第47章 I BARNEY RETURNS TO LUTHA(3)

And so he decided before the night was spent to put him-self as far from his family as possible, lest some future attempt upon his life might endanger theirs. Then, too, righteous anger and a desire for revenge prompted his de-cision. He would run Maenck to earth and have an ac-counting with him. It was evident that his life would not be worth a farthing so long as the fellow was at liberty.

Before dawn he swore the gardener and chauffeur to si-lence, and at breakfast announced his intention of leaving that day for New York to seek a commission as correspondent with an old classmate, who owned the New York Evening National. At the hotel Barney inquired of the proprietor relative to a bearded stranger, but the man had had no one of that description registered. Chance, however, gave him a clue. His roadster was in a repair shop, and as he stopped in to get it he overheard a conversation that told him all he wanted to know. As he stood talking with the foreman a dust-covered automobile pulled into the garage.

"Hello, Bill," called the foreman to the driver. "Where you been so early?""Took a guy to Lincoln," replied the other. "He was in an awful hurry. I bet we broke all the records for that stretch of road this morning--I never knew the old boat had it in her.""Who was it?" asked Barney.

"I dunno," replied the driver. "Talked like a furriner, and looked the part. Bushy black beard. Said he was a German army officer, an' had to beat it back on account of the war.

Seemed to me like he was mighty anxious to get back there an' be killed."Barney waited to hear no more. He did not even go home to say good-bye to his family. Instead he leaped into his gray roadster--a later model of the one he had lost in Lutha--and the last that Beatrice, Nebraska, saw of him was a whirling cloud of dust as he raced north out of town toward Lincoln.

He was five minutes too late into the capital city to catch the eastbound limited that Maenck must have taken; but he caught the next through train for Chicago, and the second day thereafter found him in New York. There he had little difficulty in obtaining the desired credentials from his newspaper friend, especially since Barney offered to pay all his own expenses and donate to the paper anything he found time to write.

Passenger steamers were still sailing, though irregularly, and after scanning the passenger-lists of three he found the name he sought. "Captain Ernst Maenck, Lutha." So he had not been mistaken, after all. It was Maenck he had appre-hended on his father's grounds. Evidently the man had little fear of being followed, for he had made no effort to hide his identity in booking passage for Europe.

The steamer he had caught had sailed that very morning.

Barney was not so sorry, after all, for he had had time during his trip from Beatrice to do considerable thinking, and had found it rather difficult to determine just what to do should he have overtaken Maenck in the United States.

He couldn't kill the man in cold blood, justly as he may have deserved the fate, and the thought of causing his ar-rest and dragging his own name into the publicity of court proceedings was little less distasteful to him.

Furthermore, the pursuit of Maenck now gave Barney a legitimate excuse for returning to Lutha, or at least to the close neighborhood of the little kingdom, where he might await the outcome of events and be ready to give his services in the cause of the house of Von der Tann should they be required.

By going directly to Italy and entering Austria from that country Barney managed to arrive within the boundaries of the dual monarchy with comparatively few delays. Nor did he encounter any considerable bodies of troops until he reached the little town of Burgova, which lies not far from the Serbian frontier. Beyond this point his credentials would not carry him. The emperor's officers were polite, but firm.

No newspaper correspondents could be permitted nearer the front than Burgova.

There was nothing to be done, therefore, but wait until some propitious event gave him the opportunity to approach more closely the Serbian boundary and Lutha. In the mean-time he would communicate with Butzow, who might be able to obtain passes for him to some village nearer the Luthanian frontier, when it should be an easy matter to cross through to Serbia. He was sure the Serbian authori-ties would object less strenuously to his presence.