XXV
THE FINAL RECKONING
THE door leading to the hall was flung open. Shimilin, the Cossack captain, stood on the threshold, and behind him was a group of his wild-looking soldiers, their heads hooded with wrappings of furs, and the points of their shining bayonets bristling about their shoulders.
Shimilin did not advance, but remained in the doorway, coldly surveying those inside the room. He gave each of them a casual glance—Michael, Katerin, Peter, and even the shivering Slipitsky who stood cowering against the wall and whispering to himself through trembling lips and fingering his beard in nervous terror.
“The Ataman Zorogoff!” announced Shimilin, and the soldiers behind him opened a narrow lane, as Shimilin stepped aside and into the room.
The Ataman pushed through the guards, and strode into the room, looking straight at Peter, stern and challenging. The Mongol chieftain’s greatcoat was off, and his somewhat fantastic costume betrayed his childish love for personal display. Rising from the swarthy forehead was the towering white cap of long hairy wool, studded in the center of its flat front by a wide slab of crudely hammered gold half the size of a man’s hand, and in it set a diamond. At his left side hung a tremendous scimitar with a hilt-knot of gold fiber swinging from the guard. He wore a snuff-brown tunic with big brass buttons, blue riding breeches with double stripes of gold braid down the sides, and heavy black boots fitted with wheel-like spurs of silver. His shoulders were covered with broad straps of gold cloth. In his belt were a pair of pistols, the butts sticking up from the tops of uncovered holsters. An order of the Czar hung from the top of a tunic pocket, an odd link between the shattered empire and this usurper, who was crafty enough to display upon his person something which still had a meaning to many of his followers and reflected a trace of the vanished glory of the throne.
A pair of gold devices gleamed upon the standing collar of the tunic of the Ataman, and his long black hair which fringed his ears, was all the blacker for the whiteness of the woolly cap.
Zorogoff marched toward Peter, his boots pounding the floor belligerently, his small black eyes burning with a glittering menace. But he stopped when he could have put out his hand and touched Peter—stopped with an abrupt and final thump of the heel of his left boot as he planted it close beside the right boot.
“There is the American officer,” said Shimilin, still standing by the door. “That is the man, sir, who sent the message.”
Some of the soldiers edged into the room and grounded their rifles with jarring thuds, and the others outside in the hall pressed forward, thrusting their heads in.