"It is getting worse and worse," exclaimed Aunt Fanny's mistress,
petulantly. "I'm black and blue from head to foot, aren't you, Aunt
Fanny?"

"Ah cain' say as to de blue, Miss Bev'ly. Hit's a mos' monstrous bad
road, sho 'nough. Stay up dar, will yo'!" she concluded, jamming a bag
into an upper corner.

Miss Calhoun, tourist extraordinary, again consulted the linguist in the
saddle. She knew at the outset that the quest would be hopeless, but she
could think of no better way to pass the next hour then to extract a
mite of information from the officer.

"Now for a good old chat," she said, beaming a smile upon the grizzled
Russian. "Is there a decent hotel in the village?" she asked.

They were on the edge of the village before she succeeded in finding out
all that she could, and it was not a great deal, either. She learned
that the town of Balak was in Axphain, scarcely a mile from the
Graustark line. There was an eating and sleeping house on the main
street, and the population of the place did not exceed three hundred.

When Miss Beverly awoke the next morning, sore and distressed, she
looked back upon the night with a horror that sleep had been kind enough
to interrupt only at intervals. The wretched hostelry lived long in her
secret catalogue of terrors. Her bed was not a bed; it was a
torture. The room, the table, the--but it was all too odious for
description. Fatigue was her only friend in that miserable hole. Aunt
Fanny had slept on the floor near her mistress's cot, and it was the
good old colored woman's grumbling that awoke Beverly. The sun was