IV
Due southward they bore—if Nathan kept sense of direction. It was uncanny how these horses found their footing in that fog. The ride became a nightmare in which huge bearded demons rode with him. Hour after hour it seemed to continue. Then far ahead, lights gleamed fantastic through the mist. They were approaching a settlement, back from the railroad.
Nathan had been in scores of such lost Siberian villages. One long, wide, muddy street of log huts with acres of sapling-fenced cattle pens behind: they were all alike. Two big beacons were afire before the largest house in the place, half-way up a slight incline on the right.
“You come!” ordered the Cossack.
Nathan almost fell to the ground when first his weight bore upon his stiffened leg. He groaned with the pain. But he was immediately grabbed and jostled forward. In behind the twisted fence he was hurried, while aroused villagers, a tatterdemalion crew, gathered from fifty directions.
The room into which he was pushed was low-studded and rough-hewn. Candle-lighted, its corners and furnishings were mostly in shadow. At a rough plank table in the center sat a bear of a man in a great ulster with a fur hat like a drum major’s. He had immense black whiskers—in which he might easily have lost articles of small compass such as stub pencils, cigar holders, toothpicks, pipe-stems, and never found them again—and those whiskers were finished off at the top with the longest, wildest, most wonderful pair of mustaches that Nathan dreamed could ever adhere to a male countenance and allow that male to preserve any semblance of Dignity. But there was not an inkling of doubt about the Dignity of this bear-like Commandant. It was immense, and the whiskers and mustaches did it. He took great pride in his whiskers and mustaches. Undoubtedly they had been responsible for his elevation to Commandant. A man with such stupendous hirsute adornments could be nothing less. And in further proof that he was a truly great man, across and about both breasts was a display of moth-eaten medals and badges that made his chest resemble the souvenir board of a street fakir at an Elks Field Day or Fireman’s Muster, back in Vermont.
A half-dozen of the bear’s “staff” were gathered in distressing Dignity also about the table as Nat was brought forward. They too were high-hatted and bewhiskered, though not so terrifically as the Commandant. There was but one set of such whiskers on earth, and they were upon the Commandant’s countenance. One man had a big, greasy book open before him. He appeared to be “clerk” of this Inquisition. When he wrote in the book, he put his tongue in his cheek and lowered his accipitral nose within four inches of his writing. He had hands like boxing gloves. The panther-like Cossack continued to act as interpreter.
“Now—you tell Commandant where you go,” he ordered.
“Moscow to Harbin, then to America,” declared Nathan hoarsely. The stolid ring of Tartar faces drew close to the candle-light.
“You been with Czecho-slovak—yist?”
“I passed through their lines,” assented the Yankee.
“Where you pass through lines?”
“Ybargenosk!”
“What for you go to America?”
“To tell my people the truth about the Bolsheviki,” Nathan answered. Not to humor these men meant swift and unspeakable death. “The Americanski know only lies about the Bolsheviki,” he stumbled onward, hoping against hope to make friends. “I go to America to stop the lies. It will help your cause much.”
All present seemed to be impressed when this was interpreted. A general discussion ensued, principally with hands.
“We wish to know how much Czecho-slovak at Ybargenosk,” the Cossack declared, interpreting the Commandant’s next question.
There were three hundred, a pitiful little garrison, at Ybargenosk.
“Three thousand!” said Nathan promptly.
At once any good will which he might have manufactured by his references to America and his mission was lost in the disfavor which this announcement received. Imprecations and abuses were hurled at him as though he personally were responsible.
“How far Czech’s line go?” was the next query.
“As far as Chita,” Nathan responded. “From there to Harbin the Japanese are in control.”
They questioned Nat about Czech equipment, about Czech plans, about Czech supplies, about the recent passage of goods trains, about conditions in Moscow, about a rumor which had spread over mid-Siberia that a medical train was headed westward loaded with Red Cross supplies. Nathan answered as best he could. But he was distrusted. Sentiment curdled against him.
One man wished to know if the skies were blue in America, the same as they were in Russia. Another declared that he had heard that all horses and cows in America had two legs, and how did a horse or cow move about if it only had two legs?
And such human material was striving to found a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal!
Rapidly Nathan lost caste. They took away his khaki coat and the contents of his pockets. There was much reference to the notes that the man with the big hands had recorded in the greasy book. Then from the mêlée of confusion and discussion, Nat’s blood began to curdle as he heard the general word “shteek” on all sides. (“Bayonet him!”)
The tall Cossack seemed to be defending Nat. The Cossack had to give it up. He shrugged his narrow shoulders and stalked out, his big saber rattling noisily.
With a blunt wave of his huge arm, the Commandant arose from the table. He gave an order in Russian and two men stepped forward. After a fashion they saluted. They were sandy-complexioned and had no chins. Another order, with a jerk of a big thumb toward the ashen-faced Yankee. They saluted again.
Nathan was seized and bundled from the room. The crowd trailed after. The flaming knots burned higher outside the door, death pylons now.
Into the yard Nat was dragged and the crowd fell back. They formed a semicircle for the execution. One of the soldiers drew his long glistening bayonet from a loop at his left hip. He clicked it upon the end of his rifle. Then he jumped the gun up into his hands and steeled himself for the messy thing he had been ordered to do.
But Nathan Forge of Paris, Vermont, U.S.A. had no intention of standing there and being stuck like an animal in an abattoir. His body stiffened. Horror maddened him. The only weapons, the only friends, he had left in the world were the two gnarled fists that Bernie Gridley had cauterized.
Nathan’s gorge rose. He leaped like a cat. His right fist smashed straight at the head soldier’s lack of chin. The blow broke his jaw. The gun dropped from his hands, fell sideways, and the bayonet stuck a bystander in the throat. Nathan’s boot then came up and stove into the pit of the other man’s abdomen. The man doubled like a jack-knife.
At this sudden display of agility and damage, the flabbergasted spectators shrank back. Nathan crashed another blow at the gaping features of a lean fellow who barred his way to the fence. Over the fence went the Yankee and into the murk.
And bedlam broke loose behind him! Hoarse bellows roared in the fog. Shots snapped. A group of horses by the gate began stampeding. The log house spilled soldiers and officers, and the yard bumbled like a nest of yellow-jackets.
Nathan tripped on the other side the fence and went down on his face. He cut a gash across his forehead that for the moment blinded him. But he ran—ran somehow—ran wildly.
He was suddenly thankful for the fog. It enveloped him. It shut off pursuit.
Down the hill he fled, guiding himself by weak, nebulous window lights from huts on either hand. He knew a mob was trailing after. Horses were coming. Two shots cracked in quick succession. The boy felt a deadly, cruel kick in his left arm. In an instant the arm went numb. Something warm and sticky dripped from his fingers. He had been shot. The arm was bleeding.
Into a passageway between two houses he dodged, on into cattle runs behind. Again he was living by moments. He smashed head-on into a diminutive cow. Which was the most terrified will never be known. But he did not lose his sense of direction. Down the hill the road by which they had entered the settlement turned at right angles northward, out toward that great defile in the hills. His pursuers had lost him in the fog. He skirted through back yards, climbed endless fences, bumped into all sorts of palings and impedimenta. But he reached the bottom of that incline.
There were hoarse shoutings all about him. Several more shots were fired wildly. A group of breathless, running men passed within three feet of where he crouched in the shadow of a gate.
The place swarmed with frustrated Bolsheviks who had been cheated of their quarry, outwitted by a Yankee! Nathan left it swarming. He got onto the steppe’s road and headed off northward into soggy, inky night. And fog! That fog!
The boy had a blind instinct to strike back toward the railroad. The railroad meant a frail chance for stopping a troop train and rejoining his fellows. Yet hunting the railroad in that fog was like groping for a lost love in Abaddon.
He walked into a post and had the breath knocked from him, learning that he had not yet reached the edge of the village. He stumbled over old boards, half-buried in muck. After that he groped his way more carefully with his one good arm.
The pursuers gave up the hunt early. It was nonsense, hunting a fugitive in such a fog. Sounds of the village grew fainter behind the groping, stumbling, tight-lipped Yankee. A vastness as of infinity between the planets enveloped him. There were no stars or lights. He wore neither hat nor coat—only his khaki shirt—and the fog penetrated to his marrow.
He had found the road out of town, and he tried to keep the road out of town. The only way he knew that he was keeping the road out of town was by the muck in which he staggered and sloughed his way. The moment he found himself walking on hard, frost-nipped grass, he returned to the slough.
Foot by foot, yard by yard, rod by rod, he went out and on, into absolute blackness, not daring to stop an instant, fearing the morning might find the fog lifted and disclose him. That would mean recapture and a consummation of the fate he had dodged that night.
His face became splashed with blood and muck. He could not tie a bandage about his head, first because he had no bandage, second because his left arm was useless and negligible for the tying of anything. He did not have a left arm. Only a stiff Something hitched to his left shoulder. Not that his arm had been shot away. The chance bullet had struck a nerve and effected temporary paralysis.
On! On! On!
Ankles were wrenched and twisted. Again and again he fell forward. He only saved his face by plunging his good arm, elbow deep, in bog. At times he had to stop, go back and picked up his route again.
That fog! It was thick like cheese, black like paint. It shut out noises. The slough! slough! slough! of his boots were the only sounds he heard. He might have been groping across a world-wide pit of the damned. Yet he had to go on. He must go on. He prayed for the morning and yet he feared what the morning might disclose.
He lost track of time. He could not recollect how long he and Roach had slept before that murderous crash. Roach! Poor Roach! Then it must have taken the cavalcade an hour to ride down that long defile in the hills; how many hours after that to reach the village, he had no memory or conception. He had been before the Commandant another half-hour. After a time he was obsessed with the notion that he had been going on, hours upon hours, himself. Morning must come soon. Or wasn’t it yet midnight?
Leg movement began to grow mechanical. He counted his progress by steps,—one, two, three, four, five, six! One, two, three, four, five, six! He felt of his left hand and discovered the blood had caked hard. Then the bleeding must have stopped. It was queer. But thank God for it, nevertheless.
On! On! On! One, two, three, four, five, six! One, two, three, four, five six! Lost in Siberia! Lost in Siberia! One, two, three, four, five, six!—One—two—three—four—five—six!
He grew feverish. It was almost more than human flesh and blood could endure. His injured leg was afire. Every bend of his knee sent whips of flame up and down its cords, from ankle to thigh, from thigh to ankle. One, two, three, four, five, six! Slough, slough, slough! He grew hysterical; he began talking aloud. Oh, God, keep him from weakening! Give him the strength to go on!
God!
Into his mind came another time of desperate predicament back over the years,—a night when two terrified little boys squatted in wet alders and prayed the Almighty to save them from the terrible retribution of kissing a little girl.
God!
Nathan went down on his knees. It was not because he intended to kneel in prayer. It was because he stumbled and could not rise again.
“Dear God,” he cried hoarsely, wildly. “Dear God——”
In the awful void, no seeming contact with anything mundane but the feel of mud and steppe grass beneath his boots, he felt suddenly so light-headed that he wondered what was happening to him. Was he dying?
“Dear God—Dear God——”
He fainted. Or rather, he collapsed.