"Hi there!" I thoughtlessly yelled in English, "where the devil are you
going?"
No one paid any attention to my cries. It was becoming a serious
matter. The lights grew fewer and fewer, and presently there were no
lights at all. We were, I judged, somewhere in the suburbs. I became
desperate and smashed a window. The carriage stopped so abruptly that
I went sprawling to the bottom. I was in anything but a peaceful frame
of mind, as they say, when the door swung open and I beheld, standing
at the side of it, the officer who had accompanied me from the frontier.
"What tomfoolery is this?" I demanded. I was thoroughly incensed.
"It means that Herr will act peacefully or be in danger of a broken
head," was the mind-easing reply of my quondam fellow passenger. The
driver then came down from the box, and I saw that he was the officer
who had joined us at the station.
"If it is a frolic," I said, "one of your beer hall frolics, the sooner
it is ended the better for you."
The two laughed as if what I had said was one of the funniest things
imaginable.
"Get out!"
"With pleasure!" said I.
Directly one of them lay with his back to the ground and the other was
locked in my embrace. I had not spent four years on the college campus
for intellectual benefits only. And indignation lent me additional
strength. My opponent was a powerful man, but I held him in a grip of
rage. Truthfully, I began to enjoy the situation. There is something
exhilarating in the fighting blood which rises in us now and then.
This exhilaration, however, brought about my fall. In the struggle I
forgot the other, who meantime had recovered his star-gemmed senses. A
crack from the butt of his pistol rendered me remarkably quiet and
docile. In fact, all became a vacancy till the next morning, and then
I was conscious of a terrible headache, and of a room with a window
through which a cat might have climbed without endangering its spine--a
very dexterous cat.
"Well," I mused, softly nursing the lump on my head, "here's the devil
to pay, and not a cent to pay him with."
It was evident that, without knowing it, I had become a very important
personage.