He lifted her up from the bench and kissed her, crying to her again and again that he was not dead.
“Oh, God! Thou art good!” she moaned, and then she was swept by sobs of joy and fell back upon the bench.
Michael collapsed upon the floor, and when Wassili and the old woman overcame their fears and entered the kitchen again they found father and daughter crying quietly and clinging to each other consolingly.
VI
THE PRISON ON THE HILL
PETER did not stop at the Hotel Dauria to see the room which a sleepy-eyed youth said might be had. There was a red-hot stove in the entrance-hall, a dirty stairway leading to an upper floor, a pair of stuffed bears standing among pots of rubber plants, and a few old benches on which in better days the droshky-drivers, the fur-hunters and the gossips of the city gathered of nights. The front windows were boarded up and the place still bore signs of the work of looters—leather hinges on the double doors, wall-paper ripped off in great gashes which exposed the rough plaster, and here and there the mark of a bayonet point or the pock marks of wild bullets.
Peter simply dumped his baggage in the entrance-hallway and went out again to pay off the iswostchik. Where he went, Peter wanted no one watching, so he set out as if on a casual ramble through the almost deserted streets.
He knew the way to the old prison. It would be up the Sofistkaya and over the little bridge which spanned the frozen stream running through the city. But it was not the same old wooden bridge which Peter expected to find. It proved to be a sturdy arch of concrete, level and wide.
Some of the buildings near by had been half wrecked or burned. One big building was but a shell, a black ruin streaked with snow, with the windows out and the interior walls revealing old log pillars and a few crazy rafters. From a lower window there fluttered a bit of curtain, like a distress signal from an abandoned derelict. It was the old house of the governor—Kirsakoff.
Peter lingered and studied this building. There were few people in the streets, and they paid no attention to him, for in his furs there was little about him to mark him as a foreign officer, or a soldier at all, for that matter, because he wore his pistol under his outer coat in such way that he could reach it through a pocket.