The Queen's Advocate
9781465671028
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It was a rifle shot, sure enough, somewhere in the hills, and Chris raised his huge head with a low growl and thrust his nose against me in warning. I was lying on the flat of my back, my hands clasped under my head, thinking lazily, as I watched the glorious sunset amid the Gravenje hills—where the play of sunset colour is at times almost as fine as in Colorado—and speculated when the storm which was brewing would break. I had just been chuckling at the idea of what the men in Wall Street or the dandies of Fifth Avenue would have thought of Chase F. Bergwyn, millionaire, mine-owner, and financier, could they have seen me then vagabondising in the Bosnian hills. My dress was a kind of nondescript native costume, half peasant’s, half miner’s, very dirty and worn with my rough prospecting work; and I carried a ten days’ growth of scrubby beard on my sun-tanned face. The report of the rifle stopped the chuckle on my lips. One of my men must have been after some hill game, I guessed, and in the eagerness of the chase had disobeyed my strict orders against shooting. I was anxious not to draw any unnecessary attention to my doings. I was after another pile, in fact. When in Vienna, just before, I had been offered what appeared to be a good thing in the shape of a concession to work a rich mining district in these Bosnian hills, and, as I still had a touch of the vagabond in me, I was roughing it in order that I might look into the thing for myself. I knew that part of Eastern Europe pretty well. I had lived there as a lad with a relative stationed in Prague, and as I had the knack of picking up the Balkan languages, he had found me of such use that he had taken me with him on many an expedition among the hills in Bosnia, Servia, and Herzgovina. I had delighted in the hills, and had carried my love for them across the Atlantic when things changed and I went to the States in search of fortune. After a time of pretty hard rough-and-tumble hurly-burly buffetting I had “struck it rich,” and turned up in New York wealthy enough to play a strong hand in the big gambles of Wall Street. Then the wandering fever laid hold of me again, and, remembering my days in the Balkans, I was seized with the idea of utilising the old experiences for business purposes. There was money to be made, I believed; and I opened up communications with folks in Belgrade and Sofia, and was in Vienna, on my way to the Servian capital, when this Bosnian mining affair turned up. The pile was there right enough, just waiting for someone to come along and harvest it. But whether the difficulties of harvesting it could be overcome, I should have to settle elsewhere; and until they were settled I didn’t wish to draw the inquisitive eyes of any blockheads of Austrian officials upon me. There were other dangers, too. Lalwor, a hill village, was not far off, and the reports about the villagers were not pleasing. They were not likely to jump one’s claim, or do anything of that sort, but were said to be quite ready to knock me on the head if they had an inkling that I was a rich foreigner. That at least was the opinion of the man who had acted as my guide; and probably he knew. So that, altogether, that shot annoyed me; and I sat up, thinking no more about either New York or the sunset, but just how to find out who had fired it, and bent upon punishing him for disobedience. Not so easy this last as it would have been, had I disliked all the four men composing my party less and trusted them more.
