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We are going by, and there is an end of it. This gentlemen and I are personal friends of General Rodetzsky's. We have been on a visit to my friend Lieutenant Breschia at the fortress at Itzia, and we are now on our way to Pollia. That is the town below there I believe." I more than half made him out at the time, and he confirmed my guesses later on.
If you are not 'John of Itzia, I can only fear that something dreadful has happened, for I do not believe that you could be so unkind as to leave eight consecutive letters of mine unanswered by a single word. I have only just seen the advertisement by chance, and if you are at home when this arrives it ought to reach you at about nine o'clock.
Twice this innocent blind brought us into collision with the military police, who were in a condition of perpetual disquiet, and suspected everybody. Our papers, however, were in perfect order, and Brunow in particular was so well provided with credentials that we were easily set going again, and so by a circuitous road we approached Itzia, and finally pounced down upon it from the hills.
"We have passports," I told him, producing my own paper and holding it towards him. "This is my friend, and this is my servant. The guide they gave us at Itzia has fallen ill." "You cannot pass this way," he answered, gruffly, disregarding the passport. "You must go round by the lower road." "My good fellow," Brunow broke in, airily, "you mustn't talk nonsense.
We had engaged a guide from some little village, the name of which I forget, at which we had rested on the previous night; and the castle was the first object to which he had called our attention. "There!" he cried, pausing at a sudden bend in the road, and turning half round upon us with his right hand pointing forward. "There is the fortress of Itzia. The end of your journey, gentlemen."
The artillery of to-day would reduce the fortress of Itzia to a rubbish heap in less than an hour; but it was a strong place for the date of its erection, and even now the difficulty of bringing siege guns along the broken and difficult mountain pathways makes it worth calculating as a point of resistance against invasion. I saw it first at the close of a dull day when a storm was brewing.
I tore it open and read, in embossed letters at the top of the first page, "Scarfell House, Richmond." Then came this: "My Dearest, Is the strange advertisement addressed to Violet and signed 'John of Itzia' yours? I almost think it must be, and yet I am half afraid and half ashamed to say so.
Itzia was not the sort of place for which one would make a straight road, unless one had special business there, and it was the merest seeming of having any special business there which I was profoundly anxious to avoid. So I lingered in Vienna, and on this third day, pacing the chief street, I felt a sudden hand clapped upon my shoulder, and, turning, faced Brunow.
He was on General Radetsky's staff when I knew him first an empty-headed fellow rather; but a man's glad to meet anybody in a place like Itzia; and when he asked me to dine with him at the fortress, I was jolly glad to go. 'We've got an old file here, he told me, 'the Italians would give anything to get hold of if they only knew where he was.
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