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