The Samovar Girl

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

Water-carts hauled by ponies passed, bringing water from the city wells. They were shrouded in ice. A few peasants were on their way to the station bazaar with bundles of vegetables or partridges. Chinese trotted about with packs on their backs, smugglers in sugar and tea, or traders in luxuries brought in by hand over the railroad—such luxuries as candles, buttons, cigarettes, and salt.

Peter went on till he could see above him on the hill the yellow walls of the old stockade. He mounted the slope, but headed as if to pass the prison far below, and walking as if he had no other intention than to wander up the hill and look back upon the city. He stopped at times, and looked behind him.

As he went up the slope he managed to draw in closer to the stockade. The old road had no tracks upon it, proof that the prison must be deserted. And, in fact, the city itself seemed to be deserted as he looked down into it from the upper land. Though smoke came from the chimneys, the people kept mostly indoors. There was an ominous hush in the air, as if the inhabitants were afraid to be seen. The forests gave off no sound of woodsmen or hunters. Away on the side of the plains toward Manchuria Peter could see groups of three and four horsemen on patrol. But the Valley of Despair seemed like a place in which a pestilence raged, so bare was it of living beings except around the station.

“The place is accursed!” said Peter, as he stood and gazed out over the valley and the city. “After America, I know now what this all means. And there is something which has brought me back. My father, can it be you? Can you know? Have you guided me so that justice may be done? I pray that Kirsakoff be still alive!”

And Peter did know the meaning of it all. Chita was a ghastly city built from the weeping of women and the curses of men doomed to chains and living deaths in dark cells. The very soil reeked with the blood of exiles.

And Peter Gordon, the American, was once more Peter Petrovitch Gorekin, the Russian. During the three weeks that he had been on the train from Vladivostok, he had become more Russian every day. He knew now that the Russians were not free, though the throne had been overturned. There was still work to do.

Peter went on, now straight for the entrance to the prison, where he found the heavy gate lying in the snow, torn from its iron hinges and covered with the dents of logs and rocks which had battered it down.

He entered the prison yard. There were broken tables and piles of half burned records among charred logs. The sentry platforms had been dragged down from the inner wall and made a clutter of wrecked timbers. The little windows gaped open and the iron bars across them had been bent outward. Fine, hard snow covered the wreckage like a powder, gathered here and there in the cracks of the stone walks and in the holes where the flat stones had been ripped out and overturned.

The place was without life. Yet it seemed to throb with life. Peter half expected to find people inside the long galleries of the prison buildings, though he knew that there could be no living person in such a place of horrors.

The door opening to the inner guardroom was also down, a thing of planks strapped together with iron bars. It lay askew across the stone threshold, and Peter walked over its side. It gave out a dull, hollow sound, which set the echoes going through the long inner galleries of the cell-wings. A vile odor assailed him as he stepped inside, and he shivered.