CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. 

IN WHICH SOME DESPERATE ENTERPRISES ARE UNDERTAKEN. 

At this time the Russians had taken up a strong position in the Balkan mountain range, and entrenched themselves within a short distance of the enemy. 

After a night and a day of aimless wandering, Jacob Lancey found himself at last in a rocky defile between the hostile lines. How he got there he could not tell, but there he was, in a position of imminent danger, with the sentinels of the belligerent armies on either side of him. 

Evening was setting in when he made this discovery, and recoiled, happily without having been seen, into a narrow rocky place where the fast-failing light had already deepened into gloom. A cold white fog was slowly creeping up from the valleys and covering the hill-sides. 

It is in such places and circumstances that men conceive and execute designs, which, according to their nature, are deeds of recklessness or of heroism. Two such ventures were afoot that night. 

In the Russian camp preparations were being made for a night attack on a village in possession of the Turks, and out of which, with a view to future movements, it was deemed necessary to drive them. In this village there dwelt a youth, an intimate friend of Dobri Petroff. The two had played with each other in childhood, had roamed about the country together in boyhood, and, when they reached man's estate, had become faster friends than ever, being bound by the ties of intellectual as well as physical sympathy. When this friend, Petko Borronow, left Yenilik at the death of his mother, it was to take charge of the little farm in the Balkan mountains,--the desolate home where his sister Giuana, an invalid, and a beautiful girl, was now left in solitude. 
What did he do after a death in his family?
Petko Borronow, left Yenilik at the death of his mother, 