"Just as you like," he said. "We take the horses at Scutari anyway." To which Faber responded with a further offer. "I've a car on my ship; we'll put her ashore and try that road." Louis shook his head. "No good at all; there isn't any damned road. To-day's Saturday; shall we say to-morrow morning at ten?" "But it was to be three days' time." Louis yawned. "Oh, d----n time!" he said. "I never think of it." "Then we'll start to-morrow at ten." He drank off his wine and turned to look at Maryska. She had crept nearer while they talked, and her head was bent to the floor that she might not miss a word. When Faber held out his hand to her she leaned upon her elbows and looked at him with strange eyes. "Good-bye, mister!" "You are coming on my ship, Maryska." "Not with that man," and she pointed to her father. "Pouf!" said Louis. "I will flay you with the whip." "And I will kill you with my knife," she said quickly, in Italian. It was the customary exchange of their daily compliments. Louis rather liked it. "Say," he exclaimed on the threshold, "and who may you be, anyway?" "I? Why, my name's John Faber." "Faber--Faber? I used to know a Faber in Paris in the 'seventies." "His son, sir." Louis turned his cigarette over in his mouth. "How did you hear of me?" he asked. "Oh, I got your name in Paris. The _New York Mitre_ people gave it to me." "That's odd; I used to know your mother forty years ago. Well, so long," and he turned on his heel. CHAPTER III THE DAMNABLE MOUNTAINS This was a bitter winter on the Albanian frontier, and God alone knows how the party got to Ranovica at all. None but a madman would have attempted the journey at such a moment in the story of the Balkans; but as John Faber remarked, it needed a double-barrelled charge of insanity to venture it in the winter. Yet he had told Maryska that he would go, and go he did. What a country, and what a people! The Almighty seemed to have blasted the mountains and the mountaineers alike. Such a wilderness of grey rocks, of weirdly scarped precipices, of awful caverns and fearsome valleys is to be imagined by none who have not visited it. Depict a range of mountains built up of the barren limestone into a myriad fearsome shapes of dome and turret, castle and battlement. In the valleys far below, put the gardens of the world, fertile beyond all dreams; where the grapes grow as long as the fingers on your hand, and every tropical plant luxuriates. Drive humanity from this scene and deliver it up to the world and the bear. Such is the frontier of Albania where it debouches upon Montenegro--such are the "damnable mountains," as every Christian in their vicinity has learned to call them.