The Samovar Girl

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

THE morning was cold and foggy. Through the gray and frozen haze came the sounds of voices, the creaking of boots, the jangle of a distant bell from the horses of a troika—a ghostly world filled with ghostly shapes, hidden, yet full of unseen life. It was just such a morning as that one in the past when Peter Petrovitch waited for the Czar’s mail, and the column of unfortunates went clanking out into the wilderness to cut wood under a guard of Cossack soldiers.

And he who had been Peter Petrovitch sat this morning by the window of his room in the Dauria Hotel and gazed out over the world of floating mists—Lieutenant Peter Gordon of the United States Army. In the hall, outside his door, were two tall Cossack soldiers with their rifles, on guard.

A week had passed since the killing of the Ataman Zorogoff and the death of Kirsakoff. There had been a mutiny and an attempt by partisans of Zorogoff to kill Shimilin, the new Ataman. But the Cossacks were behind Shimilin, and the Mongols and other bandits who had stood with Zorogoff found their power broken, their intrigues betrayed and their leaders dead after firing squads. The survivors fled up and down the railroad. The régime of Zorogoff was at an end, with its looting, its terrorism, its mailed fist which demanded tribute in exchange for protection.

The body of Zorogoff was not buried in Chita. The second day after his death, there appeared in the city, from down Urga way, a lama from Outer Mongolia with frosty whiskers, a pinnacle cap and a greatcoat of fine fur with sleeves which reached to the ground. He came with a retinue mounted on camels, and the leading man held aloft a small purple banner which caused many men to submit their necks when they saw it pass. For somewhere down in the mountains to the south in the khanates of the Kalkas tribes, there was a Prince, and when he spoke, it was an order—an order to be obeyed.

And this lama of grave face and the tall cap summoned the Ataman Shimilin and bartered for the body of Zorogoff, who was half Mongol by blood, and that half of interest to the holy men of Forbidden Tibet. Shimilin, being wise in such things, knew how much he could ask to the ultimate jewel—and got it. And as the lama traded with Shimilin, there were hints of many more men from Mongolia lurking outside the city, hidden by the fog. A line of tiny fires gleamed at the edge of the plain, the Cossack outposts heard the grunting of baggage camels, and the murmur of countless voices drifted in through the fog.

So Zorogoff’s body was slung up between the humps of a Bactrian camel, and the animal went swaying off through the mist, with Zorogoff’s head nodding at the ground of ancient Tartary in his last farewell.

Of these things Peter knew little. He was still in danger, as was Katerin, for there were many in Chita who sought a way to avenge Zorogoff. There were few persons who knew Katerin had killed him, but such knowledge spreads easily in Asia, where there are so many ears listening, so many eyes watching, so many tongues whispering in strange tongues. So Shimilin kept a guard over the hotel, and in it, to see that Peter and Katerin were well protected.

And Peter had seen little of Katerin during the week. He had attended the military funeral at daybreak which Shimilin had granted the old general. Katerin was there, hidden and hemmed in among the Cossacks who had served under her father. Few knew who was being buried in the cemetery on the hillside above the ruin of the old prison. So it was that General Kirsakoff became a part of the Valley of Despair which he had ruled.

Katerin seemed to avoid Peter after the funeral. She kept to her own rooms, with Wassili, except the night they went with Shimilin and his soldiers to the old log house and retrieved the fortune in rubles which was hidden in the stove.

Peter waited till the days had softened her sorrow. He knew she wanted to be alone with her thoughts, as he did with his own. He had no way of knowing how her thoughts would turn in relation to him, but one fact made him happy—Katerin was safe for the time being. He did not know that she possessed a fortune, and he supposed that she would want to remain in Chita. He did not want her to feel any debt toward him for having helped her against the Ataman Zorogoff, and he did not want to presume upon the fact that while she was under the stress of death she had admitted her love for him. There was a barrier between them he well knew—the barrier of the circumstance that Peter would never have been in Chita if he had not sought to kill her father; and behind that, the circumstance that Peter had held her father responsible for the killing of his own father, and his own imprisonment. Peter knew there was nothing which could wipe out those accursed facts, and that they would hover over all thoughts Katerin might have for him. He saw himself fettered by bonds of his own making—and in the gyves of his love for her.