The other shrugged his shoulders. "Merely that when I arrived Comrade Wenzel was not there. Neither had he been at his room for several days. One cannot arrest an absent man." He laughed slightly, as if memory of the past tickled his sense of humour. "Did you search his room?" "Yes, and found----" "What?" Impatiently Bela Kim leaned forward. The soldier stretched out his right hand, which was clenched. Slowly he opened his fingers, exposing on his palm something which made the Communist sit upright with a slight start. That at which he looked was a white knight. * * * * * * The Great Hungarian Plain, awe-inspiring in its rugged splendour, rises here and there to rocky peaks and granite eminences, upon many of which stately castles and impregnable fortresses proudly rear their turrets, for the Great Plain has been, for past centuries, the Armageddon of Europe. Here the fierce Magyars have stemmed the invasion of the Turkish hordes, have battled and died for the Cross. Here, too, at different times have the Roman Empire, Byzantium, Friuli, and Saxony all paid tribute to the unconquerable fighters of Hungary. Now once again, not yet recovered from the ravages of the Great War, it was to be the scene of a tussle, perhaps not so bloody in its action, yet none the less significant in its outcome. As Hungary, in the past, had withstood the onslaught of the fanatics of the Crescent, saved Europe from Mahomet, now in 1919 it was to fight for Europe once again, for here, on the Plain, the encroaching Bolsheviks were encountering the indomitable peasants, the tillers of the soil, the defenders of the country. The battle was not of swords, of guns, or of cannon, but of insidious propaganda undermining common sense, of bombastic promises, impossible innovations, promiscuous hangings, against all of which only tradition and unswerving loyalty to the Fatherland made stand. The saga of the Great Plain is unsung, the epic of its peasantry unwritten, but the time will come when the world will awaken to its obligations, and in all gratitude repay the debt it owes in story, song, and history. As yet, however, stunned by the years of travail, bewildered by defeat, hypnotized by the imported emissaries of Lenin and Trotsky, the peasants listened to the rantings of the Communists, and slowly absorbed their teachings. Twenty-five acres of land free for each man--the prospect was enticing--to those who had worked the day long for the big magnates, the autocratic landowners of Hungary, as had their fathers, even their grandfathers, before them. They listened, and in the end their brows frowned, their faces creased into ugly lines, and they looked toward the castles and the fortresses and growled....