Free The Complete Works of Stephen Crane by Stephen Crane

could get there, but as a matter of fact you can’t get there at the present time. A Greek army and a Turkish army are looking at each other from the sides of the river at Arta — the river is there the frontier — and Nikopolis happens to be on the wrong side. You can’t reach them. The forces at Arta will fight within three days. I know it. Of course I’ve notified our legation at Constantinople, but, with Turkish methods of communication, Nikopolis is about as far from Constantinople as New York is from Pekin.”
    Coleman arose. “They’ve run themselves into a nice mess,” he said crossly. “Well, I’m a thousand times obliged to you, I’m sure.”
    The minister opened his eyes a trifle. “You are not going to try to reach them, are you?”
    “Yes,” answered Coleman, abstractedly. “I’m going to have a try at it. Friends of mine, you know—”
    At the bureau of the hotel, the correspondent found several cables awaiting him from the alert office of the New York Eclipse. One of them read: “State Department gives out bad plight of Wainwright party lost somewhere; find them. Eclipse.” When Coleman perused the message he began to smile with seraphic bliss. Could fate have ever been less perverse.
    Whereupon he whirled himself in Athens. And it was to the considerable astonishment of some Athenians. He discovered and instantly subsidised a young Englishman who, during his absence at the front, would act as correspondent for the Eclipse at the capital. He took unto himself a dragoman and then bought three horses and hired a groom at a speed that caused a little crowd at the horse dealer’s place to come out upon the pavement and watch this surprising young man ride back toward his hotel. He had already driven his dragoman into a curious state of Oriental bewilderment and panic in which he could only lumber hastily and helplessly here and there, with his face in the meantime marked with agony. Coleman’s own field equipment had been ordered by cable from New York to London, but it was necessary to buy much tinned meats, chocolate, coffee, candles, patent food, brandy, tobaccos, medicine and other things.
    He went to bed that night feeling more placid. The train back to Patras was to start in the early morning, and he felt the satisfaction of a man who is at last about to start on his own great quest. Before he dropped off to slumber, he heard crowds cheering exultantly in the streets, and the cheering moved him as it had done in the morning. He felt that the celebration of the people was really an accompaniment to his primal reason, a reason of love and ambition to conquer in love — even as in the theatre, the music accompanies the hero in his progress. He arose once during the night to study a map of the Balkan peninsula and get nailed into his mind the exact position of Nikopolis. It was important.

CHAPTER IX .
    COLEMAN’S dragoman aroused him in the blue before dawn. The correspondent arrayed himself in one of his new khaki suits — riding breeches and a tunic well marked with buttoned pockets — and accompanied by some of his beautiful brown luggage, they departed for the station.
    The ride to Patras is a terror under ordinary circumstances. It begins in the early morning and ends in the twilight. To Coleman, having just come from Patras to Athens, this journey from Athens to Patras had all the exasperating elements of a forced recantation. Moreover, he had not come prepared to view with awe the ancient city of Corinth nor to view with admiration the limpid beauties of the gulf of that name with its olive grove shore. He was not stirred by Parnassus, a far-away snow-field high on the black shoulders of the mountains across the gulf. No; he wished to go to Nikopolis. He passed over the graves of an ancient race the gleam of whose mighty minds shot, hardly dimmed, through the clouding ages. No; he wished to go to Nikopolis. The train went at a snail’s pace, and if Coleman had an interest it was