“Yes, just a short note—that all was well with me.”
“We must try to keep it so, too. Here we are at the top of the hill. Now we’ll push along again: and then, the first train for Cracow.”
We soon covered the flat along the top and I pointed out to her the twinkling lights of Pulta below us.
“How quickly we’ve come,” she cried.
“We must have a straight story to tell. I shall say we are driving in from Vashtic—a place on the other side of Pulta—and that our carriage broke down and we had to continue the journey in this fashion. I shall ask whether Mr. Trevor, a tall fair man, was in the train at the time of the wreck. But you’ll leave the lies for Bob to tell of course.”
“How bluntly you put it.”
“Oh, we can’t help telling some. But it’s in a good cause; so we must hope they’ll pass as white ones.”
I began to understand that night that artistic lying is really a very difficult accomplishment, when inquisitive officials have to be satisfied.
I found the railway station at Pulta in the hands of the police. It had been taken into custody so to speak. When anything happens in Russian Poland, it immediately becomes an object of suspicion; and any one seeking information is at once suspected of complicity. An officer stopped us and asked in a peremptory manner: “Who are you and what do you want?”
“There has been an accident, I believe.”