“What you say is true, sir.”
The old man studied Peter carefully for a minute. “You speak,” he said finally, “as if you had spent twenty years in the Governor’s prison, instead of twenty years in America.”
“I spent time enough in his prison,” said Peter.
Katerin uttered an involuntary exclamation of surprise.
“Here! You were in the old prison here?” she asked.
“I was,” said Peter, with a grim tightening of his lips.
“But you are too young to have been an exile!” gasped Michael. “If you had been one of—us, I can well understand. There are many who have been here for long years—they have known the chains, they have known a lifetime in cells. And still, they have no stomach for meeting the Governor face to face. That is because they know Kirsakoff—and that he is not a man who can be hunted like a rabbit.”
“I also knew him,” said Peter. “I doubt if I will fear him, even if I come face to face with him—and he knows me for a Russian, and by my true name.”
“Oh! So you knew Kirsakoff?” asked Katerin. “Then it will not be so difficult for you to find him.”
“I knew him too well,” said Peter, now beginning to fear they would settle themselves against helping him to find Kirsakoff, and seeing that he would have to take them into his confidence if they were to be of any help to him. “I knew him when I was a boy here—and I have an old score to pay off. I have come to pay it, and I shall not be kept from finding Kirsakoff, even though he were the new Czar.”