“Let me see, how shall I word it?”
“I will tell you,” he said, his voice trembling. “Write where those papers are, or by God it will be your last moment alive.”
I was turning to look at him when I felt the cold circle or pistol barrel pressed to my head.
Move, I dared not, for I knew that at the least sign of resistance from me he would fire. I saw how he had reasoned. He believed that I alone knew where the papers were, and that if he shot me the secret would die with me. If I refused to write what he demanded, he would kill me and take the risk of their never being found; while if I did tell him, he would kill me just the same and get the papers afterwards.
But my precautions spelt checkmate to his ingenious scheme. Bitterly as he hated me, I knew he would not indulge his hatred at the expense of his own inevitable ruin.
“I will write something you had better read,” I said steadily, and wrote: “I have placed the papers where, if anything happens to me, the one set will pass at once into the hands of the Embassy”—I named the Power concerned—“and the other set straight to the Czar.”
I ceased writing and felt the pressure of the barrel increase as he bent forward to read the words. He gave such a start that I wondered his fingers did not pull the trigger.
“I was only testing you,” he said, then, and he tossed the revolver back in the drawer from which he had secretly taken it.
“Testing my folly, you mean, Prince Kalkov,” I said as I rose. “Seeing whether I was fool enough to put my finger in the cobra’s mouth without making sure that the fangs were drawn.”
“I am sorry. I was not myself,” he said, his voice strangely weak; and he fell into the lounge chair where I had been sitting, and lay there ashen white and trembling, so that I thought he would faint.