“But I—­”

“How can you repay me?  Bah! repay me in the other world—­below, with a drop of cold water when I parch!” And with a dulcet yet demoniacal laugh, the singular creature pushed him into a lightless lobby, slammed a door and seemed to run away, singing the refrain of the waltz which was to haunt him forever-more.

CHAPTER V.

UNDER MUNICH.

After an instant’s reflection in the impenetrable shades, Claudius concluded to follow the advice of the variety theatre’s prima donna.  While a stranger to the City of Breweries, he knew that its predestination toward thirst was due to its being the site of an ancient rock-salt mine.  In other cities, subterraneans were melodramatic; here, a labyrinth under the surface and at the level of the dancing and drinking cellars was so natural that a child of Munich, dropped into a well, would have no misgivings as to his worming his way up into the outer air.

At the worst, when pressed by hunger, he could no doubt make an appeal to the mounted patrol by night or the foot-passengers by day, whom he would hear overhead, and be released from this living burial at the cost of the imprisonment and trial which he had temporarily evaded.

Remembering that he had a box of cigar-lights, and regretting again the want of the cloak so useful in these damp passages, he lighted a match and began his flight by the sole opening that he spied.  An odor of sausages, cheese and coarse tobacco was here and there strong, and he correctly divined that at these points, fugitives, probably from the same enemy as he fled, had recently made halts.  Once assured that he was in a kind of thoroughfare, though one for the nefarious, he felt bolder and more hopeful about reaching a desirable goal.

He did not pause to think, as he continued, choosing, where there was a bifurcation, the most trampled corridor, hewn originally by the miners’ pick.  But he had much on his mind for future elaboration.  Heretofore no man could have lived a less eventful life, passed among books, globes, drawing tools and lecture notes.  In a few hours the change was great.  The quiet student, with no aspirations but the completion of his wandering-year in Italian picture-galleries, had become a fugitive from justice, and on the hands, groping in a lugubrious earthen alley, were the stains of a fellow-creature’s blood.  Then, too, the singular friendships he had formed, the old Jew and his daughter, who were awaiting him—­and this still more remarkable creature who had glanced across his path, like the divinities from above in antique poems, to point out the safe retreat.

But too long a time elapsed without his finding such an evidence of his security as he had too confidently expected.  He might have mistaken the true line, for while at any point of divergence there were marks in the earth, where traces of saline flows still glistened, and even stones and bits of stick placed in cavities in the manner of the gypsy clues familiar to social outcasts, he could not interpret them; for once, his university education proved faulty.