always the best thing,
his father had taught him. It was like listening to something which
could speak without words.

"There is a little train which goes up the Gaisberg," he said. "When
you are at the top, a world of mountains spreads around you. Lazarus
went once and told me. And we can lie out on the grass all night. Let
us go, Aide-de-camp."

So they went, each one thinking the same thought, and each boy-mind
holding its own vision. Marco was the calmer of the two, because his
belief that there was always help to be found was an accustomed one and
had ceased to seem to partake of the supernatural. He believed quite
simply that it was the working of a law, not the breaking of one, which
gave answer and led him in his quests. The Rat, who had known nothing
of laws other than those administered by police-courts, was at once
awed and fascinated by the suggestion of crossing some borderland of
the Unknown. The law of the One had baffled and overthrown him, with
its sweeping away of the enmities of passions which created wars and
called for armies. But the Law of Earthly Living seemed to offer
practical benefits if you could hold on to yourself enough to work it.

"You wouldn't get everything for nothing, as far as I can make out," he
had said to Marco. "You'd have to sweep all the rubbish out of your
mind--sweep it as if you did it with a broom--and then keep on thinking
straight and believing you were going to get things--and working for
them--and they'd come."

Then he had laughed a short ugly laugh because he recalled something.

"There was something in the Bible that my father used to jeer
about--something about a man getting what he prayed for if he believed
it," he said.

"Oh, yes, it's there," said Marco. "That if a man pray believing he
shall receive what he asks it shall be given him. All the books say
something like it. It's been said so often it makes you believe it."

"He didn't believe it, and I didn't," said The Rat.

"Nobody does--really," answered Marco, as he had done once before.
"It's because we don't know."

They went up the Gaisberg in the little train, which pushed and dragged
and panted slowly upward with them. It took them with it stubbornly
and gradually higher and higher until it had left Salzburg and the
Citadel below and had reached the world of mountains which rose and
spread and lifted great heads behind each other and beside each other
and beyond each other until t