"You have taken the oath of fealty."
"I will swear nothing. Take my life if you like, but swear I will not. If I had meant treachery, I should have had the police round us to-night like a swarm of bees. You have had a proof whether I'm true or not; and when I turn traitor, you can run a blade into my heart or lodge a bullet in my brain. But oaths are nothing to a man who means either to keep or break his word. What is the condition? I told you mine before."
"Yours is accepted. Your task is"—here he sunk his voice and whispered right into my ear—"the death of Christian Tueski."
"I accept," I answered readily. I would have accepted, had they told me to kill the Czar himself. "But it will take time. I will have no other hand in it than mine. It is a glorious commission. Mine alone the honour of success, and mine alone the danger, or mine alone the disgrace of failure." I looked on the whole thing now as more or less of a burlesque; but I played the part I had chosen as well as I could. And when the little puny rebel put out his hand in the darkness and clasped mine, I gripped his with a force that made his bones crack, as if to convey to him the intensity of my resolve and my enthusiastic pleasure at the grim work they had allotted me.
Then I was told to leave; and in a few minutes I was once more in the open air, quite as undecided then as I have always remained, as to what had been the real intentions in regard to myself. One of my chief regrets was not to be able to see the burly giant who had twisted me about on his knee as easily as I should a fowl whose neck I meant to wring. He was a man indeed to admire; and I would have given much for a sight of him.
But my guide hurried me back through the labyrinth of streets into respectable Moscow once more, and I was soon busy with my thoughts as to how long a shrift I should have before my new "comrades" would grow impatient for me to act.
Certainly they would have plenty of time for their patience to grow very cold before I should turn murderer to further their schemes. But I could not foresee the strange chain of events which was fated to fasten on me this new character that I had assumed so lightly and dramatically—the character of a desperate, bloodthirsty, and absolutely reckless Nihilist.