Of the terrors and hardships of that journey the girls passed over lightly. It was needless to torture Nancy Cowder's father, they felt. They told him only that a week after they started Nancy had become separated from them, that Nikola Petrovitch and one of their Serbian women attendants were with her at the time, and that as they were in a part of the country well known to both of them, they, in all probability, finding it impossible to overtake their own party in the rush and confusion of the fleeing mob, had sought to find a way out by another route, or had taken refuge in some mountain farm or village known to Nikola and unlikely to be reached by the enemy troops. This was the most hopeful thing they could tell him, and they made the most of the possibility, assuring him again and again that Nikola, although on crutches, was now strong and so good a mountaineer and so devoted to Nancy that he surely would find a place of safety for her. It was a slim hope--but it was a hope. If the girls had had the courage to tell Reuben Cowder the truth about their parting with Nancy, he probably would have held the hope that she had escaped as lightly as they did; but that they could not do. They urged him, more for his own sake than for hers, to go himself to Corfu or Salonika, and arrange for a search party of Serbians familiar with the western mountains. This would at least occupy him. And so, early in January, 1916, he left London. Armed with every conceivable passport and credential that sympathetic friends and officials could provide, he made straight for Durazzo,--the Albanian port held then by the Italians--the port from which so many of the refugees had been transferred to Corfu, to Corsica, and to Italy. It seemed to him sometimes on his journey that he was following a call. "Durazzo!--Durazzo!"--rang in his ears, whispered itself to him in his sleep. So impelling was his conviction that he must at once get there that all contrary counsels, whatever their source, left him unmoved, and so to Durazzo he went, arriving the third week of the month. The Austro-Hungarians were already in Albania; they had taken ports to the north. It looked very much as if Reuben Cowder had arrived only in time to witness the Italian evacuation. Searching for a lost one in that confusion was heart-breaking work. What was one woman among the thousands lost and dead in that horrible flight before the advancing army! The valleys, the hillsides, the crannies of the mountain on the route that they had traveled, were filled with hideous proofs of the anguish and death that marked the escape of the Serbians. Fully half of the army and of the civilian hordes that followed it were scattered or dead. Durazzo had been filled for weeks with the laments of those who sought fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, children--and never found them.