But after an hour of careful progress, as he reached a projection of rock which hung over the road below, he crouched, suddenly listening. For he heard the sound of voices, a rumble of wheels, and the creaking and clanking of heavy metallic objects. The sounds came nearer, swelling in proportion, now clearly distinguishable; and so lying flat upon his stomach, he parted the bushes at the edge of the rock and peered over. There was a cloud of dust and the clatter of iron-shod boots against the flints of the road, and in a moment he made out long ranks of soldiers, marching rapidly to the northward into the Pass. Renwick knew that the northern end of the Pass was already strongly guarded, for his host had told him that many soldiers had gone through during the weeks before; but the sight of these hurrying men, the shrouded guns which lumbered amidst them, and the long line of motor trucks and wagons which followed, gave Renwick a notion that events of military importance were pending in the Galician plain beyond. He tried to form some idea of the number of men that passed. A regiment--two, three, four--artillery--three batteries at least. For an hour or more they passed, and then at last, silence and solitude.
Although adequately disguised, Renwick was in no position to be stopped and searched, for if he wore no marks of identification, his automatic, and the money pinned in his trousers lining, would have made him an object of suspicion, the more so in a country where soldiers were moving in so precarious a military situation.
And so he descended slowly, hiding in a copse at the base of the rocks where he waited for a while listening, and then peered cautiously out. Then matching his footsteps to those of the soldiers, he crossed the road obliquely and plunged through the bushes down over the rocks to the bed of the Dukla, where he waited and listened again, crossing the stream at last by a fallen tree and reaching the protection of the undergrowth upon the farther bank.
Though he had been able to learn little in Budapest of the military situation, even from Herr Koulos, the sight of Austrian soldiers marching toward the northern end of the Pass assured him that the Russians must have won important victories in Galicia, thus placing all the passes of the Carpathians in jeopardy. But whatever his interest in conjectures regarding the possibility of victory or defeat, his own business was too urgent to admit of other issues, and so he made his way forward cautiously through the underbrush, which in places was almost impenetrable. Four-footed things, startled by this unusual invasion of their hunting ground, started up almost beside him and fled--rabbits, squirrels, a wolf, and a brown bear, which rocked upon its four legs dubiously for a moment, and then lumbered comically away. These creatures and the pathless woods advised him that however frequented the mountain road below, the inhabitants hereabout were not in the habit of traversing the wooded mountain sides. Moving forward slowly he climbed the hills in the general direction of the castle, the sunlit bastions of which suddenly appeared through the foliage above him and to the right.