ng him on sight."

As the young man spoke the storekeeper had examined his face closely
for the first time. A shrewd look came into the man's ordinarily
stolid countenance. He leaned forward quite close to the other's
ear.

"We of Lutha," he whispered, "love our 'mad king'--no reward could
be offered that would tempt us to betray him. Even in
self-protection we would not kill him, we of the mountains who
remember him as a boy and loved his father and his grandfather,
before him.

"But there are the scum of the low country in the army these days,
who would do anything for money, and it is these that the king must
guard against. I could not help but note that mein Herr spoke too
perfect German for a foreigner. Were I in mein Herr's place, I
should speak mostly the English, and, too, I should shave off the
'full, reddish-brown beard.'"

Whereupon the storekeeper turned hastily back into his shop, leaving
Barney Custer of Beatrice, Nebraska, U.S.A., to wonder if all the
inhabitants of Lutha were afflicted with a mental disorder similar
to that of the unfortunate ruler.

"I don't wonder," soliloquized the young man, "that he advised me to
shave off this ridiculous crop of alfalfa. Hang election bets,
anyway; if things had gone half right I shouldn't have had to wear
this badge of idiocy. And to think that it's got to be for a whole
month longer! A year's a mighty long while at best, but a year in
company with a full set of red whiskers is an eternity."

The road out of Tafelberg wound upward among tall trees toward the
pass that would lead him across the next valley on his way to the
Old Forest, where he hoped to find some excellent shooting.
All his life Barney had promised himself that some day he should
visit his mother's native land, and now that he was here he found it
as wild and beautiful as she had said it would be.

Neither his mother nor his father had ever returned to the little
country since the day, thirty years before, that the big American
had literally stolen his bride away, escaping across the border but
a scant half-hour ahead of the pursuing troop of Luthanian cavalry.
Barney had often wondered why it was that neither of them would ever
speak of those days, or of the early life of his mother, Victoria
Rubinroth, though of the beauties of her native land Mrs. Custer
never tired of talking.

Barney Custer was thinking of these things as his machine wound up
the picturesque road. Just before him w