Chapter XIII: Tue Young Nihilist

A week from that time, and after William Barnwell had made himself thoroughly familiar with the secrets and the workings of this great and mysterious order, the order that has shaken thrones and hurled tyrants to their final account, he started for Germany.

The reader knows something of the cruel sufferings of our hero. Being a free-born American, a natural hater of tyranny in all its forms, and enduring it as he did, it is no wonder that he sought revenge, and that his heart should naturally go out in behalf of oppressed humanity, when he had tasted of that barbarian oppression himself.

With his identity thoroughly established, his passports all correct, and his heart full with the new doctrine that his initiation had developed in him, together with the mission which poor old Batavsky had intrusted him with, he bade good-by to Russia.

From St. Petersburg he went to Warsaw, and from there to Posen, Germany, where he felt for the first time since leaving his native land that he was in the domain of freedom.

Before leaving Russia he had sent home for his entire fortune, and at Berlin had it converted into German money, and it was so considerable that he soon became known as the rich cosmopolitan.

Gradually he made his way towards the little hamlet of Merz, near the border, and when the warm season began he went there with his servant, horses and carriage (one built to order for a special object), and took up his residence in a small town patronized almost entirely by the few travelers who find their way to this part of Germany.

He was now near the alleged hiding-place of Batavsky's rubles, and while seemingly only rambling over the wild country, he was studying the diagram that the old man had given him and trying to locate the hiding-place by the aid of it.

The location most nearly agreeing with the diagram was about a mile from the little tavern, and every day he would visit it with his gun, or sometimes with a sketch-book, the better to enable him to throw off suspicion should he chance to encounter anyone--a very improbable thing, however, since it was a desolate, uninhabited region, without roads and with nothing to attract anyone save its cragged grandeur.

Indeed, it was so barren of game that the landlord advised him to go in any other direction when in search of it.

But day by day he visited it, and the oftener he did so the greater the fascination of the rugged hills became to him.

The thought that a million rubles lay hidden away somewhere in the vicinity was a fascination in itself, but the more he went the more he felt that the spirit of the old exile was hovering about the place.

Often and often he wished that he but possessed the means--which so many claim nowadays--of communicating with the departed, for the feeling grew upon him so that he could not resist its influence.

"Batavsky!" he said one day, involuntarily, and the echo of the word from half a dozen peaks and crags so startled him that he did not try it again.

But for some reason or other, the last of the echoes was the loudest, and the name came back to him as clearly as he had spoken it, from a hill of verdureless rocks some two thousand yards distant:

"Batavsky!"

"Goodness, how distinct!" he mused. "But why more distinct from that inaccessible hill than from the others? Was it the work of--ah, pshaw! I am allowing the absurdity of spiritualism to get the better of my reason. And yet, after all, who knows? There be more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. But it was only echo."

He was seated on an opposite eminence, holding the worn old diagram in his hand, and trying to get at a certain point which would be the key to the location, but could not find it.

Finally, almost involuntarily, he started down the declivity and began slowly to make his way towards the forbidding pile of rocks which had sent back the echo so startlingly.

Why he sought the place he did not know. It was no more promising than other immediate locations, and besides, he had visited it a day or two before, although from another direction.

Slowly he approached and surveyed it, comparing it with his diagram. At length he saw a point that seemed to resemble the one he sought, and after studying it a moment, started to see if he could find the succeeding one.

Coming close to a dark opening, he was startled by fierce growls, and the next instant half a dozen fierce wolves sprang from it, and set upon him savagely.