That night again Franz didn’t trouble to undress. He lay on the bed in his clothes, and let the candle burn out as it would in its socket. Early next morning, with the restlessness of a hunted man, he rose betimes, and went down to the wonted breakfast of the inn with Cousin Fridolin. Their talk over their coffee was of Linnet and Andreas. Fridolin retailed to him, bit by bit, all the sinister surmises of the village gossips; people thought at St Valentin Andreas was jealous at last of his beautiful Frau—Fridolin let his voice drop to a confidential key—and had brought her away hither from some lover in London. Franz smiled bitterly at that thought; why, the man hadn’t heart enough in him to be even jealous—for one may be beneath jealousy as one may be above it. Was he unkind to her? Franz asked, curiously, as Cousin Fridolin broke off in the midst of a sentence.
Well, he didn’t exactly strike her, Cousin Fridolin believed; though, to be sure, when she first came to the inn, she bore marks of violence. But she cried all day, and she cried all night; and folks fancied in the village it might perhaps be for Will Deverill. At any rate, she and Andreas lost no love between them; man said it was only as a good Catholic she stopped with him.
After breakfast, Franz rose up and walked out on the road aimlessly. Restless still, with the ever-present fear of detection upon him, and with the fiery Tyrolese heart eating itself out within, he walked on and on, hardly knowing why he did so. At last he reached Zell, the little capital of the valley. It was early still, for he had started at daybreak; but already a strange group of whispering villagers crowded agog round the door of the post-office and telegraph, where the post-master was affixing an official notice. Franz joined them, and read. His blood ran cold within him. It was a Kaiserlich-Königlich police announcement of a public reward of ten thousand florins for information leading to the capture of one Karl von Forstemann of Vienna—age, height, and description as below annexed—accused of the murder of Joaquin Holmes, an American citizen, at Monte Carlo, and known to have returned to Austrian territory by Verona and Botzen, where he had altered his clothing, and gone on to Innsbruck.
As Franz read those damning words, he knew in a second all was really up with him. Once they had tracked him so far, they must track him to St Valentin. Again the instinct of his race drove him back towards his native village, after a word or two interchanged with his friends at the post-office. Those simple country souls never dreamt in their hearts of suspecting their old comrade, Franz Lindner the jäger, who had come back unexpectedly, like Andreas and Linnet, of being the Karl von Forstemann of Vienna referred to in the announcement. But Franz knew it couldn’t be long before the police were on his track; and he turned and fled upwards to his old home at St Valentin, like a fox to its lair, or a rabbit to its burrow.
All the way up the hill his soul seethed within him. He would sell his life dear, if the worst came to the worst; they should fight for it now before ever they took him. He had stopped at a shop at Zell to buy a jäger’s knife, in place of the one he had left behind him at Monte Carlo, in the card-sharper’s body. He stuck it ostentatiously in the leather belt he had bought at Botzen to complete his costume; as he went on his way, he fingered it ever and anon with affectionate familiarity. Old moods came back to him; with his feather in his hat and his blade by his side, he felt himself once more a true Tyrolese Robbler. The thin veneer of Regent Street had dropped off as if by magic; when they wanted to arrest him, they should fight for it first; who would take him, must follow him like a fleet-footed chamois up the rocks behind St Valentin. And whoever came first should receive that good knife, plump, so, in his bosom, or plunge his own, if he could, into Franz’s. He would die like a man with his dagger in his hand. No rope or axe should ever finish the life of a free mountain jäger!
Thus thinking to himself, at last he reached the inn. On the threshold, Cousin Fridolin met him, distinctly penitent. “Andreas knows you’re here, friend Franz,” he said, with a reluctant air. “I didn’t quite tell him, but he guessed it, and wormed it out of me. He’s gone for a walk just now with Linnet—she’s grown such a fine lady. But there, I forgot; you’ve seen her in London.”
“Yes; I’ve seen her in London,” Franz answered, half-dreamily, in a musing undertone. His voice was as the voice of a condemned criminal. He knew he was doomed. He knew he must die. It might be to-day, or it might be to-morrow; but, sooner or later, he felt sure, the police would be after him.
He stalked moodily into the inn, and dropped, tired, into a chair in the parlour bar, with his legs extended straight in front of him in a despondent attitude. There he sat and reflected. Cousin Fridolin’s voice ran on, but Franz never heeded it. How little it meant to him now, Cousin Fridolin’s chatter about Linnet and Andreas! What did he care whether they were rich enough to buy up the whole parish, as Fridolin asserted, and have money left over? In a few short weeks, nothing on earth would make any difference. He gazed at his feet, and knit his brows, and breathed hard. Cousin Fridolin by his side ran on unchecked. Franz answered him nothing.
By-and-by the latch lifted—and Andreas Hausberger entered, followed close by Linnet.
Andreas gazed at his man angrily. Then he turned round to his wife. “Go to your room, Linnet,” he said, in his stern tone of command. “I must speak with this fellow.”
Linnet, cowed and trembling, slank off without a word. Franz could see she was pale, and had suffered greatly. Her cheeks had fallen in, her colour had flown, her lips were bloodless, her eye had lost its lustre. Andreas spoke to her in an ugly, domineering voice. Franz glared at him in his wrath. Surely, surely it was high time old scores were wiped out, and this question at least of Linnet’s happiness settled.
He must die himself soon; of that he felt quite sure; ’tis a chance which a Robbler has long been accustomed to keep vividly before him. But it would be something at least to feel he didn’t lose his own life in vain; that he was avenging himself on Andreas, and freeing Linnet. If guillotined he must be, it was better he should be guillotined for killing Andreas Hausberger on a woman’s behalf, than for stabbing a base card-sharper in a drunken brawl at Monte Carlo.
In such temper, at last, did Franz Lindner stand up and confront with mortal hate his old unforgiven enemy. Andreas turned to him with a little sneer. He spoke in English, lest Cousin Fridolin, bustling about behind the bar at his business, should overhear him and know what they were saying. “Well, what are you doing here?” he asked, with a contemptuous curl of those cynical lips. “Deverill sent you, I suppose. You’ve come all this way to spy upon me and my wife as his flunkey.”
Franz took a step forward, and glared at him fiercely from under his eyebrows. “I have not, liar,” he answered, his fingers twitching. “I didn’t know you were here, and I am no man’s flunkey.”
The return to his native air and his native costume, coupled with the gravity and danger of the situation, seemed to have raised him all at once from the music-hall level to the higher and nobler plane of the Tyrolese mountaineer. He looked and moved every inch a freeman—nay, more, he confronted Andreas with such haughty self-confidence that his enemy, surprised, drew back half-a-step and surveyed him critically. “That’s a very strange coincidence,” Andreas murmured, after a short pause. “It’s curious you should choose the exact moment to come when I happened to be at St Valentin.”
Franz scowled at him yet again. “You can take it how you like,” he retorted, in German, with a toss of the head in his old defiant fashion. “If you choose to think I came here to follow you and fight you, you’re at liberty to think so. I’m ready, if you are. I’ve an old cause of quarrel against you, recollect, Andreas Hausberger. You robbed me by fraud long ago of the woman I loved; you married her by force; and you’ve made her life unhappy. If I dogged you, which I haven’t done, I’d have cause enough and to spare. You remember that first night when I saw you in London, in Mrs Palmer’s box at the Harmony Theatre? Well, if it hadn’t been for the presence of the woman I loved—the woman you stole from me—that very first night, you false cur, I’d have buried my knife in you.”
Andreas drew back yet another pace. He was taller than Franz, very big and powerful. With a contemptuous look, he measured his enemy from head to foot. “Why, you couldn’t, you fool,” he answered, drawing himself up to his full height. “I never yet was afraid of you or of any man. Many’s the time I’ve turned you, drunk, out of this very room. I’ll turn you out again if you dare to speak so to me!”
He was wearing a Tyrolese hat, just like Franz’s own; he had bought it at Jenbach on his eastward route, to return, as was his wont, at each fresh visit home, to the simplicity and freedom of his native mountains. Before Franz’s very eyes he removed it from his head, and, with a sneer on his face, turned the blackcock’s feather Robbler-wise as a challenge of defiance.
No Robbler on earth could overlook such a wager of battle. Trembling with rage, Franz Lindner sprang forth, and leaped angrily towards him. His face was black as night; his brow was like thunder. He snatched the hat from Andreas’s head with a deft flank movement, and tore hastily from its band the offending emblem.
“Was kost die Feder?” he cried, in a tone of angry contempt, holding it up triumphantly before its owner’s eyes. All the west was blotted out; Franz Lindner was himself again. He was a Robbler once more, with the hot blood of his Robblerhood boiling fierce within him.
Quick as lightning, the familiar answer rang out in clear tones, “Fünf Finger und ein Griff!” Andreas brooked no such insult. “Five fingers and a grip”—he should have if he wanted them.
Before Cousin Fridolin had time to understand what was passing before his eyes, or to intervene to prevent it—in the twinkle of an eye, with extraordinary rapidity, the two men had closed, hands and arms fast locked, and were grappling with one another in a deadly struggle. Franz flung himself upon his foe like a tiger in its fury. One moment, his knife flashed high in air. Cousin Fridolin rushed forward, and strove to tear them asunder. But, before he could reach them, that gleaming blade had risen above Franz’s head and flashed down again, with unerring aim, on Andreas Hausberger’s bosom. The big man fell back heavily, both hands pressed to his heart, where black blood was oozing out in long, deep, thick gurgles.
With a sudden jerk, Franz flung down the knife he had wrenched from the wound. It stuck quivering by its point in the wooden flooring. Then he thrust his hands into his pockets, with one foot pushed forward. He clenched his teeth, and bent his head towards the dying man’s body. “I always meant to kill you,” he cried, in his gratified rage, “and, thank God and all blessed saints, to-day I’ve done it.”
Cousin Fridolin jumped forward, and bent aghast over the body. But Franz stood still, gazing on it calmly. At that moment, the door opened, and Linnet entered.
