Thomas Ochiltree Read Online Free

hero, Admiral Teggerthoff, who had routed the Italians at Lissa. Now the Prater amusement park was on his right. Night had quite fallen, and the gimcrack booths and the Great Wheel were ablaze with light. Von Falkenburg hated amusement parks, but some of the girls he had known had loved them: Annie, for instance. He remembered the condescension – good natured, but condescension nevertheless – which he had felt when she had begged him to take her to the Prater, and the way she had hugged him when he had agreed to do so. That had been before he really knew her, when she was just another little shop assistant he had bedded. He was sorry about that condescension now, even though he had hardly remembered it when she was alive.
    Annie was dead, and that made her almost a sister. But that was an absurd thought. Annie did not exist. Nor did Endrödy. Nor would he, soon.
    But he was sorry that he had not understood her better; had not understood that the pride she had felt at being seen with him in the Prater was not the pride of a shop girl being seen with an officer from a smart regiment, but the pride of a woman at being seen with the man she loved.
    The Prater was behind them now, and von Falkenburg put his thoughts of Annie behind him with a shudder. After all, it was cold. And the dead do not make very good company.
    The harness brasses jingled musically, and the hooves of the horse fell on the cobblestones like a steady rain. The city had been pretty well left behind. Ahead was darkness, broken only by a few streetlights, and the headlamp of an approaching streetcar. It rattled by, its interior glowing a soft yellow, its seats empty.
    “The Rudolfsbrücke, Captain.”
    The great bridge was more brightly lit that the street leading to it, but its upper girders were still lost in the gloom.
    “Stop here.”
    Von Falkenburg got out.
    “Shall I wait?”
    “No.”
    The cabby shrugged his shoulders, then turned the cab and headed off, while von Falkenburg stared out over the bridge. Beneath it, deep, wide and powerful, flowed the silent Danube on its way to the sea. This was not the branch known as the Danube Canal that ran along one side of the Inner City and that most foreigners thought of as the Danube. This was the great river itself, and though the wind blew through his tunic, von Falkenburg drew comfort from the Danube’s strength.
    He heard the blast of a steam whistle behind him, and crossed over to the downstream side of the bridge. One of the big paddle steamers was getting ready to cast off for Budapest. Her decks sparkled with lights, and through the windows of her varnished superstructure von Falkenburg glimpsed the comforts she offered. Tomorrow morning her passengers would awake in their soft bunks, go into the dining saloon for breakfast, and later watch the Budapest waterfront slide by. Tonight there would be music and wine, dancing and love. Von Falkenburg had once taken a steamer down the Danube with a woman. He gripped the iron railing with helpless rage and despair.
    The steamer cast off and pulled away from the landing stage, the soft churning of her paddle wheels breaking the stillness of the night. She headed downstream, and von Falkenburg watched her go, feeling more utterly alone than he ever had in his life.
    He crossed back over to the upstream side of the bridge so that the lights of the steamer would not distract him. He had an important decision to make. He had to decide whether to live or die.
    The colonel had told him that his choices were suicide, or trial and conviction followed by the firing squad or life imprisonment, but the sight of the steamer suggest a third one: flight. Even if he had to walk back to the Prater to get a cab, in an hour or two he could be at either the West or the South Station, from which a mahogany-paneled
Wagon-Lits
sleeping car could carry him anywhere in Europe. Von Falkenburg imagined the warm blankets pulled up under his chin, and the determined pounding of the