Read Online A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess by Ron Miller - Free Book Online

to continue his cooperation? The answer is that they are mad, of course, and therefore irresponsible and incapable of being understood by a rational human being.
    Instead, he sets his mind to work on the problem of escape. The fact that it is on the face of it patently impossible only increases his interest in the puzzle. He’d never yet failed to escape from any situation (he had been working on a foolproof scheme to escape Kaposvar when the princess and her friends mtervened) and he sees no reason why this should be any different. It is also possible, perhaps, that he is beginning to believe that he is in fact interchangeable with the impossible baron in the dime novels that bear his licensed name.
    For several weeks his only contact with the outside world has been a brief glimpse of a hairy forearm twice a day as his keeper passed food to him and collected his chamber pot. After a dozen attempts to cajole and trick whoever was at the other end of the gnarly limb into saying a word or two, he gave up. Eventually it occurred to him that if it was impossible for him to even see his jailer, let alone communicate with him, it was equally impossible for the other to see or communicate with the baron. The person on the far side of the door only knew of the baron’s presence because the food disappeared and the chamber pot was regularly filled. What if his captor was to be denied even those rudimentary reassurances of his existence? How much would it take to inspire curiosity? If, in fact, there actually is an intelligence at the opposite end of that unprepossessing appendage.
    Although the baron’s scheme does not require much intelligence on the part of his keeper, it would be costly: it requires a fast that would last for days, nor is he able to do more than wet his lips with the water he is given, for fear that even the slightest drop in level might be detected. Eventually he even abandons that and resorts to licking the drooling walls or soaking a piece of cloth torn from his shirt and wringing the green liquid into his mouth. At first it is no sacrifice to ignore the loathsome food he is given, but after the second day it becomse a torture to allow even that miserable allotment to lay for hours no further into his cell than the hairy-knuckled hand had pushed it. The same hand would reappear half a day later and pull the untouched food out. Have the change in routine been too subtle for his jailer to have noticed? Has there been any comment when his chamber pot is no longer passed through? It is as though there is only a mindless machine on the other side of the door. What if, believing him to be dead, the supply of food is stopped altogether? The baron resolves to give the guard’s curiosity another forty-eight hours, which is as much as he thinks he himself can bear.
    In the meantime, Milnikov listens carefully, his ear pressed against the cold, wet iron. He never hears any voices, or at least any sounds that he can be certain are voices, but he does become conscious of something that mystifies him: rumblings like heavy trucks with iron wheels rolling across cobbled floors. The sounds come and go constantly. It is as though he is in the depths of a mine. What can it mean?
    Four more times the hairy hand pushes a bowl of food and a cup of water through the opening and four more times the untouched food is fetched back through it. The baron has never dreamed that the miserable crusts and soft grey sausage can ever possibly look appealing. They still do not, but the possibility is becoming ever more tenable. What is hardest to bear is the ever-increasing stench. The cell is absolutely unventilated and the baron begins to actually fear for his life in reality. What a dreadful and ignominious way to go, asphyxiated by my own excretions.
    The meal delivery after the fourth one is late. The baron begins to worry that perhaps his plan has been oversuccessful. What if the mere assumption that he is dead is sufficient for his