ink that, with you removed
definitely and permanently, all will then be plain sailing for him
in that direction. Evidently he does not know the princess."

An hour later they were all bidding Butzow good-bye at the station.
Victoria Custer was genuinely grieved to see him go, for she liked
this soldierly young officer of the Royal Horse Guards immensely.

"You must come back to America soon," she urged.

He looked down at her from the steps of the moving train. There was
something in his expression that she had never seen there before.

"I want to come back soon," he answered, "to--to Beatrice," and he
flushed and smiled at his own stumbling tongue.

For about a week Barney Custer moped disconsolately, principally
about the ruins of the corn mill. He was in everyone's way and
accomplished nothing.

"I was never intended for a captain of industry," he confided to his
partner for the hundredth time. "I wish some excuse would pop up to
which I might hang a reason for beating it to Europe. There's
something doing there. Nearly everybody has declared war upon
everybody else, and here I am stagnating in peace. I'd even welcome
a tornado."

His excuse was to come sooner than he imagined. That night, after
the other members of his family had retired, Barney sat smoking
within a screened porch off the living-room. His thoughts were upon
a trim little figure in riding togs, as he had first seen it nearly
two years before, clinging desperately to a runaway horse upon the
narrow mountain road above Tafelberg.

He lived that thrilling experience through again as he had many
times before. He even smiled as he recalled the series of events
that had resulted from his resemblance to the mad king of Lutha.

They had come to a culmination at the time when the king, whom
Barney had placed upon a throne at the risk of his own life,
discovered that his savior loved the girl to whom the king had been
betrothed since childhood and that the girl returned the American's
love even after she knew that he had but played the part of a king.

Barney's cigar, forgotten, had long since died out. Not even its
former fitful glow proclaimed his presence upon the porch, whose
black shadows completely enveloped him. Before him stretched a wide
acreage of lawn, tree dotted at the side of the house. Bushes hid
the stone wall that marked the boundary of the Custer grounds and
extended here and there out upon the sward among the trees. The
nigh