She cried out with rage against him, and sprang at him and struck him in the face with her open hand. Then she threw up her arm and whirled away from him, to run behind the screen of her bed as if to get a weapon. But Shimilin grasped her by the shoulders and pulled her back into the center of the room. She tore away from him.
“Kill me!” she cried. “There is nothing left in life for me now. Kill me, too!”
“No, I will not kill you,” said Shimilin suavely. “We do not kill women like you too soon, Katerin Stephanovna.”
“You are swine!” she raged. “You told us my father was to go to the Ataman. Talk to me no more, but kill me here!”
Shimilin said nothing, but stood looking at her with every sign of being on the verge of complying with her command. But he did not put hand to pistol. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled, went to the bed behind the screen and pulled off a blanket. He threw it to her but she let it fall upon the floor.
“Take the blanket,” he said gruffly. “You may have death if you want it, but not by my hand. Take the blanket and come with me to the soldiers below.”
Katerin kicked the blanket aside.
“I do not fear the cold any more than I fear death,” she said quietly, and moved to the door. “Come! I will show you how a Russian woman can die!”
Shimilin followed her down the stairs to the hall below. The old woman in the kitchen who did the cooking was crying in a room beyond the kitchen, out of sight. Katerin felt impelled to call a farewell to the old woman, and to Wassili, but she refrained because she suspected that the two servants might protest to the soldiers and draw ill treatment and probably death.
So she passed down the hall and out through the double doors into the courtyard. The place was full of soldiers, and her eyes lit at once upon a pile of fresh, brown earth near the wagon-shed. That, she knew, was her father’s grave. She walked straight to the mound, and stopping beside it, turned and faced the soldiers.