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Updated: May 13, 2025
He had raised it above the head of the prince regent, and was repeating the solemn words which precede the placing of the golden circlet upon the man's brow. In another moment Peter of Blentz would be proclaimed the king of Lutha. By her father's side stood Emma von der Tann. Upon her haughty, high-bred face there was no sign of the emotions which ran riot within her fair bosom.
The other stared at Peter of Blentz for several seconds while the atrocity of his chief's plan filtered through his brain. "My God!" he exclaimed at last. "You mean that you wish me to murder Leopold with my own hands?" "You put it too crudely, my dear Coblich," replied the other. "I cannot do it," muttered Coblich. "I have never killed a man in my life. I am getting old. No, I could never do it.
Ah, it will be told and retold, handed down from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation to the end of time. How the cavalry that the king sent north toward Blentz met the advancing Austrian army. How, fighting, they fell back upon the infantry which lay, a thin line that stretched east and west across the north of Lustadt, in its first line of trenches.
Arrogance, haughtiness, and petty tyranny had marked his reign. Taxes had gone even higher than under the corrupt influence of the Blentz regime. The king's days were spent in bed; his nights in dissipation. Old Ludwig von der Tann seemed Lutha's only friend at court. Him the people loved and trusted.
They agreed to support him in his regency if he produced proof that the true Leopold was dead, and Peter of Blentz waited with growing anxiety the coming of Coblich with word that he had the king in custody. Peter was staking all on a single daring move which he had decided to make in his game of intrigue.
"And now, Prince Ludwig," said the American after the Serbian had bowed himself out of the apartment, "I suggest that you take immediate steps to entrench a strong force north of Lustadt along the road to Blentz." Von der Tann smiled as he replied. "It is already done, sire," he said. "But I passed in along the road this morning," said Barney, "and saw nothing of such preparations."
Upon the heights above the town Barney Custer and the old Prince von der Tann stood surrounded by officers and aides watching the advance of a skirmish line up the slopes toward Lustadt. Behind, the thin line columns of troops were marching under cover of two batteries of field artillery that Peter of Blentz had placed upon a wooden knoll to the southeast of the city.
He, too, out of the corner of his eye watched the advancing figure. Suddenly he noted the limp, and gave a little involuntary gasp. He looked at the Princess Emma, and saw her eyes suddenly widen with consternation. Slowly at first, and then in a sudden tidal wave of memory, Butzow's story of the fight in the courtyard at Blentz came back to her. "I saw but little of Mr. Custer," he had said.
Some bushes intervened he could not get a clear view of them, yet there was something about the figure of the woman, whose back was toward him as she struggled to mount her frightened horse, that caused him to leap rapidly toward her. He rounded a tree a few paces from her just as the man a trooper in the uniform of the house of Blentz caught her arm and dragged her from the saddle.
"He has treated me with every consideration and respect, and I am convinced that he was not a willing party to my arrest and forcible detention at Blentz; or," she added, "if he was, he regretted his action later and has made full reparation by bringing me to Lustadt." Prince von der Tann found difficulty in hiding his surprise at this evidence of chivalry in the cowardly king.
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