Barney Custer was prepared to fight.  He was desperate.  He could have slunk from the Castle of Blentz as he had entered it—­through the secret passageway to the ravine; but to attempt to reach Lustadt on foot was not at all compatible with the urgent haste that he felt necessary.  He must have a horse, and a horse he would have if he had to fight his way through a Blentz army.

But there were no armed retainers left at Blentz.  The guardroom was vacant; but there were arms there and ammunition.  Barney commandeered a sword and a revolver, then he walked into the courtyard and crossed to the stables.  The way took him by the garden.  In it he saw a coffin-like box resting upon planks above a grave-like excavation.  Barney investigated.  The box was empty.  Once again he grinned.  “It is not always wise,” he mused, “to count your corpses before they’re dead.  What a lot of work the old man might have spared himself if he’d only caught his cadaver first—­or at least tried to.”

Passing on by his own grave, he came to the stables.  A groom was currying a strong, clean-limbed hunter haltered in the doorway.  The man looked up as Barney approached him.  A puzzled expression entered the fellow’s eyes.  He was a young man—­a stupid-looking lout.  It was evident that he half recognized the face of the newcomer as one he had seen before.  Barney nodded to him.

“Never mind finishing,” he said.  “I am in a hurry.  You may saddle him at once.”  The voice was authoritative—­it brooked no demur.  The groom touched his forehead, dropped the currycomb and brush, and turned back into the stable to fetch saddle and bridle.

Five minutes later Barney was riding toward the gate.  The portcullis was raised—­the drawbridge spanned the moat—­no guard was there to bar his way.  The sunlight flooded the green valley, stretching lazily below him in the soft warmth of a mellow autumn morning.  Behind him he had left the brooding shadows of the grim old fortress—­the cold, cruel, depressing stronghold of intrigue, treason, and sudden death.

He threw back his shoulders and filled his lungs with the sweet, pure air of freedom.  He was a new man.  The wound in his breast was forgotten.  Lightly he touched his spurs to the hunter’s sides.  Tossing his head and curveting, the animal broke into a long, easy trot.  Where the road dipped into the ravine and down through the village to the valley the rider drew his restless mount into a walk; but, once in the valley, he let him out.  Barney took the short road to Lustadt.  It would cut ten miles off the distance that the main wagonroad covered, and it was a good road for a horseman.  It should bring him to Lustadt by one o’clock or a little after.  The road wound through the hills to the east of the main highway, and was scarcely more than a trail where it crossed the Ru River upon a narrow bridge that spanned the deep mountain gorge that walls the Ru for ten miles through the hills.