“Excuse, please,” he said in slow hesitating words. “Me, I no mek trouble, no. Me, I theenk maybe can help. Me, I want keel all Bolshevik fellow. Ah! heem, I dreenk he blood!”
“By Jove, he speaks English!” cried Mr. Henderson.
“I’ll say he does!” agreed Rawlins with a grin. “Always has, just been bluffing all along, but he’s through with that now. I’ll tell you the story in a few words. Two days out we sighted a disabled powerboat and running alongside found Smernoff just about all in lying in the bottom. You can just bet I was about knocked clean over when I saw him. Last I’d seen of him he was under lock and key in jail and here he was bobbing up in a little power boat in the middle of the Atlantic. Of course none of the men knew him so I said nothing—told them he was a bit looney and we’d have to keep him locked up.
“The next day he spoke to me in English and nearly bowled me over again by doing so. Then he told me he’d escaped and all about it. Said he’d got away by the aid of some ‘red’ sympathizers in the prison and had hidden with friends on the East Side somewhere down in Allen Street. While he was lying low he got word from Russia that his whole family—kids and all—had been murdered by the Bolshevists and he went clean off his head at that. It was one thing to be a ‘red’ and kill others and a different matter to have the ‘reds’ killing your folks.
“Well, the upshot of it was that he swung clean around and only had one thought and that was to get even. He started in by doing up all the ‘reds’ he knew around his hang-out and then hit it for the docks with the idea of clearing out—stowing away—in some ship that would get him to Europe. But he couldn’t make it. Too many cops about and so he grabbed a powerboat, paddled away from the docks at night and started for the open sea.
“He wasn’t nutty enough to expect to cross in the craft, but he had an idea he could get well off the land and sight some outward bound ship and get picked up. Only trouble was he hadn’t figured on a northwest gale which drove him off the steamships’ courses and left him disabled and without grub or water. Drifted three days and nights before we hove in sight. He thinks it’s a direct act of God and I don’t know but he’s right. At any rate, he’s keen on being with us and if he is in earnest—and I reckon he wouldn’t have taken the chance he did if he wasn’t—he’ll be a help to us all right.”
“It’s one of those miraculous coincidences that are far stranger than fiction,” commented Mr. Pauling. “But I am skeptical about his story. How do we know it is not a tissue of lies? He may have merely tried to escape the police in the launch and invented this yarn to hoodwink us. I guess we’d better keep him locked up.”
“Well he’s got the letter telling about his folks being killed,” said Rawlins.
“H-m-m, and his face is changed—I’m inclined to believe him,” declared Mr. Henderson. “You know, Pauling,” he continued, “there are no more vindictive enemies of the ‘reds’ than one of their company who suffers at their hands. You must remember that Ivan was as fanatical a Soviet as ever lived until his parents were butchered.”
“Yes, you’re right, Henderson,” admitted Mr. Pauling. “We’ll have a long talk with Smernoff and get at the truth. But for the present we’ll leave him. Plenty of time after we’re under way.”