Excerpt from The Storm Birds "Proceed Venice immediately report commanding officer Louisville." The young man in the first-class compartment of the afternoon train from Udine had already committed the words to memory; their first perusal had fixed them indelibly in his mind. But he spread out the slip of paper on which they had been hurriedly scrawled and examined it with an intensity of interest which would have betrayed at once to any onlooker that the message held some hidden meaning which he was striving in vain to penetrate. There were no curious eyes to observe him, however. He was the only passenger in the only firstclass compartment in the train, one of those delightfully inconsequential, dawdling affairs which, in this country, would be labeled "accommodation," or "mixed freight," in the schedules of the railroad, and which, in Europe, not being rated officially as "express," never ruffle the serenity of their slumbrous dignity by moving faster than an excited small dog can run. The solitary first-class passenger was not disturbed, however, by the speed, - or lack of it, - of this train. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.