So impelling was his conviction that he must at once get there that all contrary counsels, whatever their source, left him unmoved, and so to Durazzo he went, arriving the third week of the month. The Austro-Hungarians were already in Albania; they had taken ports to the north. It looked very much as if Reuben Cowder had arrived only in time to witness the Italian evacuation.
Searching for a lost one in that confusion was heart-breaking work. What was one woman among the thousands lost and dead in that horrible flight before the advancing army! The valleys, the hillsides, the crannies of the mountain on the route that they had traveled, were filled with hideous proofs of the anguish and death that marked the escape of the Serbians. Fully half of the army and of the civilian hordes that followed it were scattered or dead. Durazzo had been filled for weeks with the laments of those who sought fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, children--and never found them.
When he told the officials all he knew of Nancy since she left Valievo in November, he was assured that there was not a chance in a hundred--one despairing official said a thousand--that she was alive.
True, she might have gone through with some group which had reached Corfu or Corsica or Italy, but the probabilities were that in that case she would have cabled. It was not likely that she was alive if she had fallen behind. True, she might be concealed in some mountain hamlet, but no searching party was possible under any auspices now. "You would have to bring over an American army to protect you, and I understand you Americans are too proud to fight," one bitter, over-worked Italian Red Cross official flung at him. In all his determined, well-ordered, effective life, Reuben Cowder had never experienced before what he acknowledged to be a hopeless situation. This was hopeless.
He had followed a call. It had led him to Durazzo, and now, as if to mock his faith, he saw the enemy ready to sweep him into the sea as it had the people his daughter had befriended, and for whom he was willing to say now that she had died.
And then the impossible happened. Three days after his arrival, a Red Cross official, who had been particularly interested in his case, hastily summoned him to headquarters. A party of five men and two women, disguised as Albanian peasants, had just reached Durazzo. Such groups were common in those days. One of the men in this party--a man on crutches, a Serbian, claimed that a woman whom they carried with them in a rude hammock was an American. He had begged them to cable at once to Reuben Cowder of Sabinsport, U. S. A., telling him his daughter was alive. He had asked for a nurse, and one had been sent to their lodgings. The Serbian had not been told that the man whom he sought was in all probability at that moment in Durazzo.