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At a little distance, three officers, one of them Mirakoff, were talking together, and beside them, thrown on an outspread coat, was a heap of oddments, chiefly papers, revolvers, and "killers." As I looked a soldier gathered these up into a bundle, and hoisted it on his shoulder. A watch and chain fell out, and he picked them up, and pocketed them.
I said with the utmost politeness, stepping aside, so he had to pass out, though I guessed he was angry enough at losing my conversation, for I was telling Lieutenant Mirakoff of my arrest, as a great joke, at which we both laughed uproariously. "They should have seen that you were a foreigner, and therefore quite mad, and harmless," he cried. "Now, I ought to call you out for that!" I asserted.
There came a battering at the barred door, to which my back was turned, and a moment afterwards the other door swung open, and an officer sprang in, sword in hand, followed by a couple of soldiers with fixed bayonets. He stopped short, with an exclamation of astonishment, at the sight of the dead man, and I laughed aloud, and called: "Hello, Mirakoff!"
My mouth and throat were parched with a burning thirst that was even worse than the pain in my arm. The group of officers dispersed, and Mirakoff crossed over to me. "Well, you are recovering?" he asked curtly. I moved my lips, but no sound would come, so I just looked up at him. He saw how it was with me, and ordered the soldier to fetch water.
He was a decent youngster, that Mirakoff, too good for a Russian; he must have had some foreign blood in him. "This is a serious matter," he said, while the man was gone. "Lucky I chanced on you, or you'd have been finished off at once, and shoved in there with the rest" he jerked his head towards the new-made grave. "I've done the best I could for you.
"Fetch more water," he said abruptly to the soldier, who had heard all that passed, and might or might not understand; the Russians are a polyglot people. "I have done what I could," Mirakoff continued hurriedly in the brief interval while we were alone. "You had two passports. I took the false one, it is yonder; they will think it belongs to one of the dead men.
It was bad enough, even at the beginning; though, as Mirakoff had said, it would have been worse but for his intervention. A few minutes after he left me, I was hoisted into a kind of improvised carrying chair, borne by a couple of big soldiers, who went along the narrow track at a jog-trot, and amused themselves by bumping me against every tree trunk that was conveniently near.
"No. I came alone." "At least he knew you were coming?" "He may have done. I can't say." He shrugged his shoulders. "Have it your own way. You will regret your obstinacy later; remember, I have warned you." "Thanks, it's good of you, Mirakoff; but I've told you all I mean to tell any one." He paused, biting his mustache, and frowning down at me.
I put a sheet of note-paper into an envelope, and addressed it to Lieutenant Mirakoff at his barracks. His was the first name that occurred to me. "You know him?" he asked, pointing to the name. "Very slightly." He nodded and picked up the note, holding it carefully by one corner between his filthy thumb and finger.
It was during one of these brief halts I saw something that discounted the tidings I had heard from Mirakoff. I was the least hurt of any of the wretched occupants of the wagon, and I had managed to drag myself to the far end and to sit there, in the off-side corner, my knees hunched up to my chin.
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