n. Still we have a good chance, even if it has begun."

Three times, as they walked along the river bank, Steve made a long
detour inland.

"The Austrians have patrols along the river," he said. "But they don't
take that sort of work very seriously. They are trusting the monitors
and their searchlights. You see, their lights are swinging pretty
steadily, and they cover the whole river and the Servian shore."

"And don't they think that there's likely to be danger on this side?"

"They're right, too, of course. Spies, yes. But we couldn't threaten
them very seriously in any way that would make it necessary for them to
be very careful here."

"I wish we knew what was going on, don't you? Doesn't it seem funny to
be right in the middle of something that's going to make history and to
think that people thousands of miles away really know more about it than
we do?"

"Yes. But soon we'll know all there is to be known. When we're once over
the river, then we can ask questions and get true answers, which is more
than people in Semlin have been doing lately. Yes, I'm just as anxious
for some news as you are. I rather wish now that I'd gone out while we
were waiting for it to be late enough to start. But I suppose it was
better that I didn't. You'd have been helpless there if anything had
happened to keep me from coming back," remarked Stepan.

"If you'd been caught, you mean?"

"Ye--es, I suppose that's what I mean. Although really I don't think
there was ever any great danger of that. When I got a job from Hallo, it
was sure that no one suspected me, because he's so busy with government
contracts that he had to be careful. I'm supposed to be a Hungarian,
from Buda-Pesth. And it isn't as if I'd been trying to find out things
in a general way. All I had to do was to pick up the information that it
was so easy to get in Hallo's place. There were all sorts of things to
be learned there, and a lot was made easy for me because Hallo and
others didn't think, I suppose, that I would know what certain papers
and estimates meant."

"How did you know enough to be able to do all that sort of thing,
Steve?"

"Well, there were a lot of things I didn't understand, myself. But I
didn't have to. I just copied down everything I saw that seemed to have
anything to do with military matters in any way, and sent everything I
got to the general staff at home. They knew the meaning of everything,
you see. It wasn't any one thing, perhaps;