“To my superiors,” he answered with a grin; thinking it a joke no doubt to throw my own words back at me.
CHAPTER XV
A TASTE OF PRISON LIFE
OUTSIDE in the corridor the man from Schirmskad was waiting, and the two drove me to the railway station and hustled me into a railway carriage. They would not say where I was being taken, but I did not care much, and five minutes after I entered the train, I was fast asleep.
When I awoke it was daylight. A bleak, desolate, grey morning, for the snow had come at last, and was falling heavily. I was cold and stiff from the cramped position, and sore from the jolting of the train—one never understands how a train can jolt until after an experience in what they call a fast train in Russian Poland—and as I sat up, yawned, and rubbed my eyes, every bone in my body seemed to ache.
My guards were both asleep. Had I been minded I could have taken their weapons and shot them both as they rolled in their corners, snoring loudly enough to have drowned the sound of the shots.
I roused them both, and with a great shew of politeness told them what I could have done. They both swore at me.
“It’s really very wrong of you to go to sleep in such a case,” I said amiably. “You had no right to subject a prisoner to such a temptation. I fear I shall be compelled to report you.”
“You’re a cool hand,” growled the Schirmskad man.
“Not nearly so cold as you would soon have been if I had done it,” I retorted, and the grimness of the joke seemed to appeal to them. “But Englishmen don’t do that kind of thing.”
“To hell with the English,” he said.