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He was sitting on the top of the steps as he was used to do before the palace was altered, and he too seemed quite overwhelmed with the international complication. Krsto had already given the police a highly coloured account. The secretary of Crkvitza, the Prince hastened to assure me, would be punished.
Krsto had to leave his revolver behind, and having never in his life been out without one, was as nervous as a cat and saw brigands in every bush. At which I laughed. Plevlje then was a strange sight. On one side were modern up-to-date Austrian houses with a park, smart barracks and an inn. On the hills behind it in immense letters of white stone were the initials of Franz Josef.
The reply said, "Detain him till further orders." The telegraph station was eight hours' march distant, but he had sent some one in haste on horseback. There was a terrible row. The populace was on my side. My British passport was, of course, useless. Krsto thought his honour impugned, and I feared he would shoot.
"That means third cheta assemble!" shouted Krsto. All rushed out. Sure enough a telegram had arrived saying "The Turks are over the border! Mobilize at once!" Every one was delighted. The men hustled into their great-coats. The women stuffed bread and a bottle of rakia into their torbitzas.
At Nyegushi I engaged as guide one Krsto, recommended me in 1903 at Andrijevitza by a botany professor from Prague, and while our start was preparing went with Kapetan Gjuro Vrbitza and another officer by a track to the mountain's edge whence we could look directly down upon Cattaro. A gun emplacement was made there later.
Large numbers were descendants of those evicted from Montenegro or Serbia in 1878, and were therefore not well disposed to either land. Krsto was not at all pleased to find that they had changed their habitat for the better and settled in land more fertile than that from which they had been driven. He naively told me he had hoped they had all starved.
There was some dread lest, Russia being now occupied in the Far East, Austria should move. On the way we picked up an old man of the Banyani tribe, over six feet, and hook-nosed. He pointed out landmarks with his long chibouk, carried an old flintlock, and seemed to live in terror of enemies. "Golden pobratim!" he said earnestly to Krsto, "dear brother, listen!
Montenegro has never been self-supporting, and since frontier raids were stopped the chief trade of the people had been smuggling tobacco and coffee into Austria. Krsto and his relative were keen smugglers, and knew every nook in the Bocche di Cattaro. Now, in return for various works that she was to do, Italy had been given the tobacco monopoly and a duty was imposed. Montenegro was furious.
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