Meanwhile it was drawing towards evening. The Kurd’s eyes now regularly started out of his head in his endeavours to distinguish the form of Kökényesdi through the darkness. At last he grew weary of the whole business.
“Go away!” he said. “Do you hear me?”
Kökényesdi made no reply.
The Kurd waited and gazed again. Everything seemed to him to be turning round, and blue and green wheels were revolving before his eyes.
“Go away, I tell you, for if this ditch was not a broad one I would leap across and bore you through with my spear.”
The bunda never budged.
The Kurd flew into a rage, dismounted from the horse, seized his spear, and climbing down into the ditch, viciously plunged his spear into the sleeping form before him.
But how great was his consternation when he discovered that what he had looked upon as a man in the darkness was nothing but a propped up stick, on which a bunda and a hat were hanging! While he had been staring at Kökényesdi, the latter had crept from out of the bunda beneath his very eyes and hidden himself in the ditch.
The Kurd had not yet recovered from his astonishment when he heard the crack of a whip behind his back, and there was Kökényesdi sitting already on the back of Haly Pasha’s charger, Shebdiz, and the next moment he had leaped the ditch above the Kurd’s head, shouting back at him:
“The trench is not broad enough for this horse, my son!”
Master Szénasi was one of those who had been sent to find Kökényesdi, and he now arrived at Demerser, the famous robber’s most usual resting-place in those days, and pushing his way forward told him that the gentlemen of Szathmár had sent him to ask him, Kökényesdi, to assist them in their expedition against the Turks.
Kökényesdi, who was carrying a sheaf on his back, looked sharply at the magister, who dared not meet his gaze, and when he had finished his little speech he roared at him:
“You lie! You’re a spy! I don’t like the look of your mug! I’m going to hang you up!”
Szénasi, who was unacquainted with the robber chief’s peculiarities, was near collapsing with terror, whereupon Kökényesdi observed with a smile:
“Come, come, don’t tremble so, I won’t eat you up at any rate, but tell the gentleman that sent you here that another time he mustn’t send a spy to me, for to tell you the truth I don’t believe in such faces as yours. You may tell the gentleman, moreover, that if he wants to speak to me he must come himself. I don’t care about making a move on the strength of idle chatter. I am easily to be found. Go to Püspök Ladánya, walk into the last house on the right-hand side and ask the master where the Barátfa hostelry is, he’ll show you the way; and now in God’s name scuttle! and don’t look back till you’ve got home.”
The magister did as he was bid, and on getting home delivered the message to his masters, whereupon they immediately set out; Raining going on the part of the military, János Topay on the part of the Hungarians, together with Ladislaus Rákóczy himself and the captain of the gentry of Báródság.
The gentlemen safely reached Püspök Ladánya, where they had to wait at the magistrate’s house till nightfall, although Raining would have much preferred to meet Kökényesdi by daylight, and Rákóczy was burning to carry through his enterprise as soon as possible.
While they waited Raining could not help asking the magistrate whether it was far from there to the Barátfa inn?
The magistrate shook his head and maintained there was no such inn in the whole district, nor was there.
Raining fancied that the magistrate must be a stranger there, so he asked two or three old men the same question, but they all gave him the same answer: there might be a barátfa puszta9 here but there could be no inn on it, or if there was an inn, the puszta itself did not exist.
“Well, if they don’t know anything about it at the last house we had better turn back,” said Raining to himself; and, when it had grown quite dark, he approached the house and began to talk with the master who was dawdling about the door.
“God bless thee, countryman! where’s the barátfa inn?”
The man first of all measured the questioner from head to foot, and then he merely remarked: “God requite thee! over yonder!” and he vaguely indicated the direction with his head.
“We want to go there; can’t you show us the way?” asked Topay.
The man seized the questioner’s hand and pointed with it to a herdsman’s fire in the distance.
“Look; do you see the shine of its windows there?”
“Which is the way to it?”
“That way ’tis nearer, t’other way it’s quicker.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you go that way you’ll go astray the quicker, and if you go t’other way you may plump into a bog.”
“You lead us thither,” intervened Rákóczy, at the same time pressing a ducat into the man’s fist.
He looked at it, turned it round in his palm and gave it back to Rákóczy with the request that he would give him copper money in exchange for it. He could not imagine anyone giving him gold which was not false.
When this had been done he neatly led the gentlemen through the morass—wading in front of them, girded up to his waist—through those hidden places where the waterfowl were sitting on their nests, and when at last they emerged from among the thick reedy plantations they saw a hundred paces in front of them a fire of heaped up bulrushes brightly burning, by the light of which they saw a horseman standing behind it.
Here their guide stopped and the three men trotted in single file towards the fire, which suddenly died out at the very moment they were approaching it, as if someone
