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As Rezanov stood alone with Concha in the prow of the ship and alternately cast softened eyes on her intense, rapt face, and shrewd glances on the ramifications of the bay, he congratulated himself upon his precipitate action and the collusion of nature. They were sailing east, and would turn to the north in a moment.
At the Presidio of San Francisco there were some seventy men, including invalids; and the number varied little at the other military centres, Rezanov inferred, although there was a natural effort to impress the foreigner with the casual inferiority of the armed force within his ken.
"Concha always gives us something we do not expect," said Santiago to Rezanov, whose eyes were twinkling. "The other girls dance El Son and La Jota very gracefully yes. But Conchita dances with her head, and the musicians and the partner, when she takes one, have all they can do to follow. She will choose you, next, senor." Rezanov turned cold, and measured the distance to the door.
It was a singularly imposing but hardly attractive presence, thought young Arguello, until Rezanov, after stepping on shore and bowing formally, suddenly smiled and held out his hand. Then the impressionable Spaniard "melted like a woman," as he told his sister, Concha, and would have embraced the stranger on either cheek had not awe lingered to temper his enthusiasm.
It was he who got the Imperial ukase that gave the Russian-American Company its power to squeeze all the other fur hunters and traders out of the northeast, and made Rezanov and everybody belonging to it so rich your head would swim if I told you the number of doubloons they spend in a year. Nobody has ever been so clever at managing those old beasts of autocrats as he.
Upon the arrival of the two California dignitaries in the morning, Rezanov had sent Davidov and Langsdorff on shore to assure them of his gratitude and deep appreciation of the hospitality shown himself, his officers and men.
All his life he had excited interest wherever he went, but never to such a degree as on that last journey when he made his desperate fight for life and happiness. The snow rarely falls in Krasnoiarsk. It is a little oasis in the great winter desert of Siberia. Rezanov, his face turned to the window, could see the red banks on the opposite side of the river.
Langsdorff returned his polite tolerance with all the hidden resources of his spleen; but his curiosity and scientific enthusiasm would have sustained him through greater trials than the exactions of an autocrat, whom at least he had never ceased to respect in the most trying moments at Nagasaki. "Yes," said Rezanov.
Baranhov lifted his shoulders to his ears in quizzical resignation. "I suppose it matters little where the last few years left me are spent, and I can hang the medals on the walls to console me when I have rheumatism, and shout my titles from the top of the fort when the Kolosh are yelling at the barricades." "You must make yourself more comfortable," said Rezanov emphatically.
Langsdorff, surgeon and naturalist, had accompanied the Embassy to Japan, and although Rezanov had never found any man more of a bore and would willingly have seen the last of him at Kamchatka, a skilful dispenser of drugs and mender of bones was necessary in his hazardous voyages, and he retained him in his suite.
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