“No, I don’t mean England,” replied Chester.

“Why,” exclaimed the ambassador, “if it had not been for England, this war would never have happened.”

Chester looked at the ambassador sharply for a moment.

“Good night,” he said at last, and fell back in his seat.

It was dusk when the train pulled into Trieste, and the party alighted.

“We shall spend the night here,” the ambassador decided.  “I have some work to do.”

“One place suits me as well as another, if I have to stay in this kind of a country,” said Chester.

At a hotel where they were driven in a taxi, Chester was locked in a room on the fifth floor.  It was a handsomely appointed room, and Chester would have been content to spend the night there had he been in other circumstances.  But right now he wasn’t content to spend the night in Austria, no matter how well he was treated.

“I want to get out of this country,” he told himself repeatedly.  “I guess it’s a good enough country, so far as it goes, but I can plainly see it’s no place for me.”

Left alone, Chester made a tour of inspection.  The door was heavily barred.  He looked out the window.

“A long way to the ground,” he muttered.

There was no other means of egress.

“Looks like I was safe enough,” he muttered.

Again he examined the window carefully.  A slight whistle escaped him.

“A little risky,” he told himself, “but I believe it can be done.”

He walked to the door, laid his ear against it and listened intently.  No sound came from without.

“Well,” he said, straightening up, “if I am going to do it, the sooner I get busy the better.”

Quickly he stripped the covering from the bed, and with his knife slit it lengthwise.  Each strip he tied to another, until he had a strong improvised rope.  He stretched it out on the floor, and measured it carefully with his eye.  Then he again walked to the window and peered out.

“Pretty close,” he muttered, “but I believe it will reach.  The trouble is some one in one of the rooms below is liable to see me.”

Now he pushed the bed close to the window, and securely knotted one end of his improvised rope to the heavy iron bars.  Then he walked across the room to the door again and listened.

It was now dark outside and Chester realized that he could not have a better moment for his desperate attempt.  Quickly he recrossed the room, and dropped the other end of the rope out the window.  He glanced down.

“O.K.,” he said.  “Here goes.”

He leaped quickly to the sill, and a moment later was lowering himself hand over hand.  And at length he came to the end of the rope.

The ground was still far below him, but Chester had not figured the rope would reach to the ground.  Clinging tightly to the rope, he gazed quickly about.

He was now even with the window on the third floor, and he succeeded by clever work in getting a foothold on the sill; and, still clinging to the rope, he stood erect.  Inside, Chester saw the figure of a man.  Inadvertently, the lad’s foot crashed against the window pane, shattering the glass.  There was a crash, followed by a guttural exclamation from inside the room.