Colonel Dvorzhitzky (the chief of police) was scanning the sidewalk to the left, when a terrific crash went up from under the Czar’s carriage. It was as if a mass of deafening sound had lain dormant there, in the form of a vast closed fan, and the fan had suddenly flown open. The colonel’s horses reared violently, hurling him over the shoulder of his coachman. While he was surveying the left side of the street, the employe of the tramway company and several military people, coming up alongside the railing, had seen the young man in the dark overcoat lift his white package and throw it under the Czar’s carriage. The carriage came to a sudden halt amid a cloud of smoke and snow dust. A second or two passed before any of them could realise what it all meant. The young man turned about and broke into a run.
“Catch him! Hold him!” the pedestrians shrieked frantically, dashing after the running man.
He had reached a point some thirty feet back of the imperial carriage when he was hemmed in. One of the cossacks and the boy lay in the snow shrieking. One of the rear corners of the carriage was badly shattered. The rest of it was uninjured, but during the first minute or two its doors remained closed, so that the bystanders could not tell whether the Czar was hurt or not. Then the chief of police rushed up to the vehicle and flung the right door open. The Czar was unhurt, but ghastly pale. He sat bending slightly forward, his feet on the bearskin covering the floor, a gilt ash receiver on a shelf in front of him.
“The guilty man has been caught, your Imperial Majesty!” Colonel Dvorzhitzky burst out.
“Has he?” the Emperor asked, in intense agitation.
“He has, your Imperial Majesty. They are holding him. May I offer you to finish the journey in my sleigh?”
“Yes, but I first want to see the prisoner.”
Pervaded by the conviction that another plot on his life had failed, the Czar stepped out of the carriage, and accompanied by a group of officers, some from his escort and others from among the passers-by, he crossed over to the sidewalk that ran along the canal railing, erect and majestic as usual, but extremely pale with excitement, and then turning to the right he walked toward where a group of uniformed men were holding a fair-complexioned beardless young fellow against the railing. People, mostly in military uniforms, came running from every direction.
Somebody asked: “How is the Emperor?”
“Thank God,” answered the Czar, “I have escaped, but——” and he pointed at the wounded cossack and boy.