Needless to say, this shortage of blunt worried me a good deal. I could get to Munich, but how the devil was I to travel on from there? Every moment I was in Germany increased the chances of my coming adrift somehow. I wasn’t worried about being in Bavaria, for I was persuaded that Rudi’s threats of criminal charges in Munich had been all trumped-up stuff to frighten me, and there was no danger on that score. And I was a long way from Strackenz, in the last place that Sapten—or Bismarck—would have looked for me. But that damned valise full of booty was an infernal anxiety; if anyone got a whiff of its contents I was scuppered.

So I gnawed my nails the whole way—God knows I was hungry enough—and finally reached Munich in a rare state of jumps, my belly as hollow as a coffin, and my problem still unsolved.

As soon as I stepped from the station, clutching my bag and huddling in my cloak, I felt the hairs rising on my neck. There was something in the air, and I’ve sensed it too often to be mistaken. I had felt it in Kabul, the night before the Residency fell; I was to know it again at Lucknow, and half a dozen other places—the hushed quiet that hangs over a place that is waiting for a blow to fall. You sense it in a siege, or before the approach of a conquering army; folk hurry by with soft footsteps, and talk in low voices, and there is an emptiness about the streets. The life and bustle die, and the whole world seems to be listening, but no one knows what for. Munich was expectant and fearful, waiting for the whirlwind that was to rise within itself.

It was a dim, chilly evening, with only a little wind, but shops and houses were shuttered as against an impending storm. I found a little beer shop, and spent the last of my coppers on a stein and a piece of sausage. As I munched and drank I glanced over a newspaper that someone had left on the table; there had been student rioting, apparently over the closure of the university, and troops had been called out. There had been some sharp clashes, several people had been wounded, property had been destroyed, and the houses of prominent people had been virtually besieged.