Tales of Adventurers Read Free Page B

began to twitch into life. Devenor remembered that Traian was only sixty-eight; he decided to take the
responsibility of abducting father as well as son. He felt, he said, damnably ashamed of himself for shifting such fragile cargo, but, after all, that well-fitted steel cylinder was little less
comfortable than a Roumanian third-class coach. He ordered Traian into the column regretfully and decisively, as if he had been sending back a Chateaubriand for another five minutes on the
grill.
    “And look at him now,” Devenor invited, “when he brings in the brandy! I have to let him do something, you know. Oh, and he’ll take a glass with us, too – but I
can’t make the old fool sit down to it when there are guests.”
    Traian’s son was collected straight from bed, and packed into the car. He had no objection to any change, however immediate and revolutionary, so long as it took him out of the sausage
factory and included his father. He was on his way to the marshaling yards before he had really got clear of a nightmare that he was making his palate into sausages; his palate, he said, had
appeared to him as a large, white lump of lard.
    The column had left for Constantsa. So insistent were the instructions of Railways, Mines and Marine that the yardmaster had presented it with a powerful, fine locomotive of its own. That
fractionating column was going to be on board by dawn, all ready to be returned with ignominy to the corrupt capitalists who had sold it. The yardmaster expected a pat on the back from the
ministry. No doubt, when he got it, it was a hard one.
    Ion’s driver did what he was told without question; he knew what happened to undersecretaries’ chauffeurs who talked out of turn. They crossed the plain like a pair of headlights on
the wind, but always the column kept a little ahead – for at intervals they had to bump over rutted country roads to the railway, or show Ion’s credentials to saluting police.
    They caught up with their flatcar at last, halted in the sidings before the bridge over the Danube and now with a train at its tail. A more awkward place couldn’t have been found for a
return to the safe recesses of the column, but they had no choice. It was their last chance, the absolute last chance. One side of the cylinder was flooded by the arc lights of the yard, as if some
monstrous camera were about to take a farewell picture of it; on the other side was much coming and going of officials, and of the sentries who would ride every truck across the Cernavoda
bridge.
    Godson Ion told his driver to return to Bucharest if he did not come back in half an hour. He did not seem unduly alarmed.
    “Of course he wasn’t! Of course he wasn’t!” Devenor crowed indignantly. “That dam’ pup had a perfect right to go wherever he wanted. As for the rest of us, we
were just a problem to be shelved.”
    In ten minutes Godson returned for Nicu, who went with him unwillingly. But there was no object in protesting against Ion’s plans; he controlled their fate. Devenor didn’t know what
he intended, and couldn’t make head or tail of his explanations; he was only rendered thoroughly suspicious by a lot of high-flown nonsense about the young clearing the way for the old.
    Traian and Devenor occupied a patch of darkness whence they could watch both the car and the column. They saw the two shadows of Ion and Nicu dive under the train. Shortly afterwards they saw
the sentries posted. They waited for five more anxious minutes. Then the train started, and they watched its red taillight swaying down the track towards the bridge and the impassable Danube.
    After a journey of two hundred yards the train stopped. Devenor was so angry that he marched Traian straight up the line after it. He intended, he said, to get hold of the sentry and consign the
whole heartless bunch of undersecretaries to Siberia, even if he had to endure their company on the way.
    The sentry was on the platform of the flatcar,