John had learned in Munich the location of Auersperg’s principal castle.  It was Zillenstein in a spur of the Eastern Alps just inside Austria, where for centuries the Auerspergs had held great state, as princes of the Holy Roman Empire.  Now when they were princes of both the German and the Austro-Hungarian empires with their greater fealty for the former, they often went there nevertheless, and John’s information in Munich made him quite sure that the prince had gone directly toward the ancient stronghold.

Auersperg could cover the distance quickly in his powerful automobiles, but it would take John a long time on foot, helped by an occasional ride in a peasant’s cart.  Nevertheless he hung on with patience and pertinacity.  He was but a single man on a quest in the heart of Germany, but in the old days men had gone alone through a world of dangers to the Holy Sepulchre and had returned.  He was not far from the path taken by those from Western Europe, and he was uplifted by the knowledge.  The feeling that he, too, was a crusader grew strongly upon him, and by night and day was his support.

He crossed the border at last and came to Salzburg in the mountains, where the gray-green Salzach flows down from the glaciers and divides the town.  The place was thronged with soldiers, and the summit of the frowning Muenchburg was alive with activity.  Here in the very heart of the Teutonic confederation, far from hostile frontiers, travelers were not subjected to such rigid scrutiny.  It was deemed that everything was safely German, and John could travel at ease almost like an inhabitant of the land.

Salzburg looked familiar to him.  There had been much to photograph it upon his mind.  He remembered the uneasy night he and his uncle had passed there before his flight with Lannes, which had taken him into such a train of vast events.  It had been only seven or eight months before but it seemed many times as long.  He had felt himself a boy in Vienna, he felt himself a man now.  He had been through great battles, he had seen the world in convulsion, his life a dozen times had hung on a hair, and since it is experience that makes a man he was older than most of those twice his age.

He was stopping after his custom at an obscure inn, and in the moonlight he strolled through the little city.  In its place among the mountains on both sides of the gray-green river it was full of romance to him, romance colored all the more deeply by memory.  Off there among those peaks the Arrow had first come for him and Lannes, while here the great Mozart had been born and lay buried.  In remoter days Huns had swept through these passes, coming from Asian deserts to the pillage of Europe.

John sat down on a bench in the little square before the cathedral and looked up at the mountains.  He knew the exact location in which lay Zillenstein, the ancient seat of the Auersperg race, and he calculated that in two days he could reach it on foot, the lone youth in peasant’s garb, pursuing the powerful prince and general, surrounded by retainers and hussars and in the land of his ancestors.