“Yes, to both. Turner came over yesterday. He salvaged your airplane and took your maps and sketches back to Headquarters. He said the colonel received them with enthusiasm.”
Under the glow of this satisfaction Bob forgot his regrets, the loss of his plane and his own helplessness. With vague thoughts of past Christmases flitting through his mind he sank into what was this time profound and restful sleep.
When he awoke again he was enough stronger to think clearly and without gaps in his memory. It was almost dark in the room and, outside, the snow-fields were glimmering in the twilight of early afternoon. The stove sent out a pleasant heat that Bob was still near enough to his escape from freezing to rejoice in. He thought now of the skirmish in the clouds with the Fokker biplane, and of the German pilot whom he had seen face to face. He began to long for news of the battle-front. He wondered whether the Bolsheviki’s meagre air forces had been further increased. At this point in his reflections the man in the cot beside him sat up and looked at him, with deep, sad grey eyes, set in a thin, fever-worn, unshaven face.
“Good-day,” he said, speaking English with a slight lisp and great deliberation. “You are better, I hope?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Bob, studying him. The stranger’s melancholy eyes and oddly vibrating voice so aroused his curiosity that almost unconsciously he asked, “Who are you, please?”
The man hesitated a second before he answered, “I am a Russian prisoner—brought wounded here.”
“I see,” said Bob and relapsed into silence.
His neighbor looked at him, his sad eyes gleaming as though with thoughts he did not know how or feared to put into words. After a moment he seemed to reach a decision for, pushing himself upright in bed with his thin, trembling hands, he said with a sort of jerky eagerness, “I am not a Bolshevik, Gospodin (sir). I am not an enemy.”
“Uh?” Bob’s incredulity expressed itself in something like a grunt, which he did not trouble to make more articulate. He had heard plenty of German prisoners, seeking to please their captors, make the same sort of protestations. At what he took to be cowardly fawning he lost interest in his strange neighbor.
The Russian, however, visibly excited, darted glances almost beseeching toward the American, who lay looking out of the little window in unsympathetic silence. He started to address Bob again, frowned, hesitated, then plunged into speech. He spoke fluently enough, except for an occasional Russian word inserted where his English failed him.