"And the police--? What has Zaidee said to the police?"
"Merely that the Excellencies were here--in this house."
"I do not know. It would seem that they have forgotten."
"The hundred _kroner_ will make me dumb."
"Nothing of me, you understand. I am but Stefan Thomasevics----"
"You are sure. The Excellency left no message--no note----?"
Renwick pushed the hundred _kroner_ note toward Selim and straightened.
"You have done me a service, Selim. They have gone to the east of the Tatra----"
"Tatra!" suddenly shouted Selim triumphantly. "It is the name!"
"Yes. Tatra--that is it. They spoke of it for half an hour. Eh--Zaidee?"
"Selim," he said at last, "it is now dark. I must go at once."
"A hundred _kroner_--that is blessing enough for one day, Stefan Thomasevics," he laughed.
"Adieu!" said Renwick, and walked bravely off into the starlight.
At least he now had a goal--"the center of the map, near the top"--the Tatra region by which Goritz had passed (if he had not been intercepted) into Galicia and so into Germany. Aside from the value of Selim's information, one other fact stood out. The secret service men who had visited Selim a month ago had not returned. Did this mean that Herr Windt had already succeeded in closing the door of escape? The passes through the Carpathians could of course be easily guarded and closed, for there were few of them accessible to traffic by automobile. Was Renwick's goal, after all, to be there and not beyond? He had put in one summer in the Tatra region with Captain Otway of the Embassy, and he knew the district well,--a country of mountain villages, feudal castles, and rugged roads. Otway had been interested in the military problems of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Renwick remembered the importance of the Tatra as a natural barrier to Russian ambitions. The shortest automobile road into Silesia lay to the _east_ of the Tatra range--and the passes through the Carpathians at this point were few and well known. By process of elimination, Renwick had at last assured himself that his first theory was tenable, for Selim had confirmed it. A hundred conjectures flashed into the Englishman's mind as he trudged onward, to be one by one dismissed and relegated to the limbo of uncertainty. But assuming that Selim had told the truth, Renwick had found the trail, and would follow wherever it might lead him, to its end.