IN FEAR OF A THRONE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14145, 21 August 1909, Page 3 (Supplement)

IN FEAR OF A THRONE.

BY R. ANDOM AND R. HODDER. Authors of "We Three and Toddles," Martha and I," " The Identity-. Exchange,", etc.........'...,■

[COPYRIGHT.]

CHAPTER Vl.—(Continued.)

Troddles, the kinglet, said nothing; he was on the broad of his back again, sleeping away in peaceful indifference to the weighty affairs of a petty little German State- which must needs get playing at history,. and . mar our tour by : making, us take a hand in it when all .we cared about was its topography and culinary possibilities. ". ..;'■,'v ••-" ■ .■ ■.; ■

All that day we lurked in the recesses of the forest. Once our new friend went in search of. refreshments,, and returned with something delicious done up in . pie-crust, and a bottle of some sparkling stuff that did excellently well as a necessary adjunct to the feast, though, Murray protested that it savoured of senna and bay rum, and Troddles was recalled by its aid to a recollection of the rhubarb wine of his youth such as " mother used to make." ; s l

Tobacco we had in plenty, and, as I have said, the time passed easily enough, though wo were anxious concerning our position and our absent chum. Conversation, was brief .and restricted. Now that the need for action was suspended, we were rather apathetic as far as we ourselves were concerned, and talking with our companion was of necessity a difficult and elow process. Troddles slept most of the time, and he was asleep when the shadows of the trees grew longer and longer, and a certain chilliness in the air suggested that 6iindown was nigh, and that the time for us to move was almost ripe. So we woke him up and asked him as a special favour to try and keep awake for an hour or two more, if only for the appearance of the thing.

He was agreeable, though his mood was rather resentful, and we gathered from his fragmentary remarks that if he only had possession of his twisty bicycle no one in Britsenberg would show himself more awake and energetic in getting out of it to somewhere where a man could walk down the road or enter an inn, and not go skulking about behind bushes like a nineteenth century Robin Hood with all the tinsel and romance shorn away.

"I'll tell you what, anyhow," he concluded, viciously, "I'm not going to roost out. under a blackberry bueh all night and catch my certain death of cold for all the thrones in Europe."

I think the sentiment of the party was with Troddteemine was;, anyhow. But, as Murray objected, we hadn't our bikes, and we couldn't desert old Wilks if we had, and it was better policy and honester purpose to see the thing through a little further than to get. picked up on the road like a pack of tramps sneaking off from a workhouse stone pile.

Something of this, polished up and made to sound pretty, we conveyed to our friend the C4erman, and he smiled and shrugged his shoulders, reassuringly.

We should all get lodged comfortably enough, we gathered. It only required our exercising patience until the oncoming of night made it safe to move without so much chance of our being observed. The accommodation awaited tie, and it was merely a question of policy which prevented us going after it then and there. We need scarcely fear molestation even; but the advantages to be obtained from avoiding it by the party with whom our interests were identical for the time being were so obviously great that it would be a pity to sacrifice them needlessly.

This sounded reasonable and logical, and we accepted the argument without ques-

tion, and the more that after our recent! i experience in the hands of the oppositions wo were quite content to allow the atten- ! tions of Wolfram, and hie men to lapse under the apprehension that we were comfortably cremated and "could be of no fur- ' ther menace to them. .. To, pass the. time we discussed the situa-- . tion among ourselves, and Murray ventured , an opinion that it was a silly lot of fuse and nonsense about nothing. * , "Why can't they toes for it and settle it' 1 that way?" he demanded indignantly. ''It • can't be worth much, anyhow, save the chances of getting shot or poisoned, and if it entails all this bother and worry to hold '■ on to a chance of a fourth-rate kingship ' I would sooner have my berth in the City." . "I don't know," said I. "It is not : i inviting, certainly but one does rather - incline to a preference for getting one's' rights. Do you remember how you were once summoned for refusing to pay twopence for a penny omnibus'fare?" " Oh, that wae different —it was a rank swindle," protested Murray. "That's what these people think. I suppose," said I. " And if thev brought vour bicycle along and proposed" to toes up for it with you, you wouldn't exactly call that a fair and reasonable proposition towards settling the ownership." "I wouldn't." agreed Murray emphatically. " But all the same, it's a jolly nuisance, and I wish we could recover old WOks and get away from it all. Night came down, slowly upon us, sitting there waiting for it, though on the road it ; had a trick of dropping over us like a pill : at the most inconvenient times when we ' would have paid a good round sum for just another 20 minutes of daylight. But it did come eventually. Thicker and denser grew the shadows round us, the song of ; the birds dropped to a subdued, fitful j twittering among the branches, and at last i a pitchy blackness wiped out the streaks ] of light that filtered through the tree-tops, , and we arose, shook ourselves together, 'arid I setoff in the wake of our guide....... ; It was well that we had a guide. Left) to ourselves, I am positively certain that. we - should never have emerged" from that forest J before daybreak, even if we did then. It ; was impenetrable, interminable, with no 1 paths, and no clues to show whether we were ! going north or south, east or west. !/« .-.

Just -which way we did go I have to this day not the slightest idea, but, judging from the position of far distant lights which we saw every now and again when we debouched upon a clear, open space, I was constrained to think that we were making a wide circuit round Britsenberg itself, with a view to entering the town from the. opposite direction.

Whatever the idea may have been, the , outcome was entirely satisfactory, and, so ' far as we could judge, our entry when w« made it eventually was quite unobserved. Not far did we have to travel through the quaint old streets, for, immediately after entering them, our guide drew us aside into a, sort of cul-de-sac with a formidable high : stone wall bounding it on the side nearest to us. At the bottom of this he stopped, unlocked a" small postern gate and motioned us to enter. '.•*".:,','..',;..'•'■. ■.■'■'■• .-':

• We were in the grounds of some private park, we judged, ' and remarkably well-kept ? it was. An avenue,of trees ran for quite. a quarter of a mile, and we pursued it along a well-gravelled roadway right up to the house which was to be our quarters until— we got away. ' ,"',.'.'.-. , K , ' \,. ,,, With a few words of welcome, our guide, . now our host, ushered us in, and himself led the way to sort of smoking-room or library; and there, after. a.little very, necessary cleansing, we forgot the hardships of the past day or two in the luxury of, excellent cooking, perfect attendance, a good brand of cigars, and a bottle or two of some rare old wine. Even Troddles was mollified, -','■■■ and was half understood to remark that this under-studying of kings;was. a better thing than he had expected from;the introduction. We were in that house three days; and, on the whole, I do not think we could; possibly have had a better time, short of being free and a-wheel. Winklestein, our,, host, had a remarkably pretty daughter,' Irene, who essayed to teach us German; without > much success, : though, she effectually tumbled j Murray into depths, oft sentiment that I did / not think he was capable of reaching. *;■ We y had many visitors, who came -and went''.," mysteriously, arid held . converse with us in .'> French, or, H when they did not speak that, i by the friendly intervention ; of our host. Winkelstein himself- was generous ; genial, 4j and considerate, and;" everything-' that he ?; could suggest or, his house supply was constrained to make our stay pleasant and easy. Troddles grew perceptibly plumper, and we more than once admonished him concerning the pains and penalties that he was laying up for himself against the time when, once more a-wheel, nothing.save his own exertions would serve to bring him back to the ; seat at the bank where he earned a precarious living as a decorative tableau of slumber on a stool. -- -.;'/;'•)»:.':-Iv -^'^'i'^y'^'-e'* ■';,;''

Troddles said he didn't believe there...wa> ; any bank, and, as for the tour, we must all of us have been dreaming. yi ,;,;, >^ "As a matter of fact,'' said he, "we have got into a soft of a nightmare—-been drugged or something, and by-aud-by we shall wake up and find the firo out, the: household gone to bed, and the .tune getting ion for midnight." ' . . ia .) ,'; , It was on the afternoon "of. the third day '"'; that the first development came. - In cue v morning we had .received visits from the ; Chief Minister and the Princess, and, since ;- we didn't seem, particularly, to be wanted, ; ; f ; and were a little tired of the whole thing, ' Murray and I had left the conspirators; with their unpromising puppet, and gone out : into the park. ~ . , , ;It was long enough;and. pretty enough in all conscience; but the arch provider of mischief for idle hands gave Murray an idea that he would like to see something of what lay outside the boundaries, ape].; when Murray gets an idea of any sort iit is safe to : prophesy that he will carry it out, particularly if there are urgent and pressing reasons why he shouldn't. ; ■:■:■■ - "I am a bit sick of this, Bob," he urged. "To live under this continual supervision is ■ oppressive to my'simple tastes and wild desire for freedom.? ■'"' ■ ' * ; ' "The living is good," I urged faintly, for I too was getting slightly tired of the detention. ' "Oh, we are coming .back ;to that safe enough," said Murray, with a touch of wistful yearning in his tone. "I acknowledge the advantages as well as the duty of acting on the square; 'but Ido want nutter in a state of comparative freedom, and we'll get it now, and fortify ourselves for a further 1 period of captivity by smoking a- pipe about the streets of Britsenberg. ? Come on!" ■■ . ' Still faintly protesting, I followed Murray, dodged with him into a thick grove of trees, threaded.a tangled mass of bush and under- \ growth, and came at last to a ten-foot fencing of stout oak, up which I " bunked " my , companion* who, in turn, lent me a hand : from the top. It was an easy matter to drop into the street below, a quiet, deserted • pathway, that seemed to have no distinct use ; or purpose to serve. In the absence of signs ;■ we trusted to our luck. • "

" Right or left?" queried Murray. " Right,'' said I, indifferently. " Right it is," was the flippant response. As a matter, of fact, it was wrong, and that footpath was a deceitful snare. We followed it for a couple of miles or more without encountering a house or a man, and then we came to the conclusion that, wherever it might lead us, it was certainly not into the town —at least not the end we had got hold of. We were in the town before we started, practically, and it wouldn't have taken more than five minutes' steady walking to land us among the shops and houses had we '• been going right. , I suggested retracing our steps ; but Murray objected. He said that would be such a, commonplace, unimaginable thing»to do. We would circle round a bit to the left and keep going. He was quite content, he said, so long' as his tobacco lasted, and he was enjoying himself too much to care over much which way we went or where we landed. I took the fun a good deal more" soberly . myself, remembering that we hadn't got quite out of the danger zone yet, acid that, moreover, we had left hostages in the shape of friends and bicycles behind that made it imperative for us to keep in touch with our ;■■■ hospitable German friend.; j Still, there was nothing I could advance against Murray's determination, save the uneasy feeling that' we had no business to be outsider the park . boundaries at all—the sort of;, oppression , which weighs oh' a schoolboy when fie plays truant. So I took careful, topographical t; notes as I went along, and hoped' that the , escapade would end without 'exciting or. ; ; unpleasant development, V,. •.. ; ; (To be continued daily), . : . :■■■!■■ :■■■. , " i • "■') '.'.■ i-i,.-:. ■>;'