“Last night, before we left Innspruck, between the time when you escaped from the villa and when I joined you in the avenue.  I climbed out of the window to descend as I had entered, but the sentinel had returned.  I waited on the window-ledge crouched against the wall until he should show me his back.  After five minutes or so he did.  He stamped on the snow and marched up the lane.  I let myself down and hung by my hands, but he turned on his beat before I could drop.  He marched back; I clung to the ledge, thinking that in the darkness he would pass on beneath me and never notice.  He did not notice; but my fingers were frozen and numbed with the cold.  I felt them slipping; I could cling no longer, and I fell.  Luckily I fell just as he passed beneath me; I dropped feet foremost upon his shoulders, and he went down without a cry.  I left him lying stunned there on the snow; but he will be found, or he will recover.  Either way our escape will be discovered, and no later than this morning.  Nay, it must already have been discovered.  Already Innspruck’s bells are ringing the alarm; already the pursuit is begun—­” and he leaned his head from the window and cried, “Faster! faster!” O’Toole, for his part, shouted, “Trinkgeldt!” It was the only word of German which he knew.  “But,” said he, “there was a Saracen lady I learned about at school who travelled over Europe and found her lover in an alehouse in London, with no word but his name to help her over the road.  Sure, it would be a strange thing if I couldn’t travel all over Germany with the help of ‘Trinkgeldt.’”

The word certainly had its efficacy with the postillion.  “Trinkgeldt!” cried O’Toole, and the berlin rocked and lurched and leaped down the pass.  The snow was now less deep, the drifts fewer.  The road wound along a mountain-side:  at one window rose the rock; from the other the travellers looked down hundreds of feet to the bed of the valley and the boiling torrent of the Adige.  It was a mere narrow ribbon of a road made by the Romans, without a thought for the convenience of travellers in a later day; and as the carriage turned a corner, O’Toole, mounted on his horse, saw ahead a heavy cart crawling up towards them.  The carter saw the berlin thundering down towards him behind its four maddened horses, and he drew his cart to the inside of the road against the rock.  The postillion tugged at his reins; he had not sufficient interval of space to check his team; he threw a despairing glance at O’Toole.  It seemed impossible the berlin could pass.  There was no use to cry out; O’Toole fell behind the carriage with his mind made up.  He looked down the precipice; he saw in his imagination the huge carriage with its tangled, struggling horses falling sheer into the foam of the river.  He could not ride back to Bologna with that story to tell; he and his horse must take the same quick, steep road.