He knew this place well. There were broken desks here, and gun-racks on the walls had been ripped from their supports. It was here that he had been taken the morning after his father had been cut down by the Cossack before the post-house. And Peter saw again in his mind’s eye the commandant with the gold bars on his shoulders, he heard again the careless questions snapped at him. Then he saw himself, a terrified little boy, led down the long gallery and thrust into a dark cell.
He pushed on now into the gallery with its battered cell doors lying half inside and half outside the cells, some swinging crazily on bent hinges, some partly burned and lying in bits of charred wood, others splintered and their fragments strewn along the stone-floored passage.
His feet made dull echoes. There was a sound of frightened things scampering into dark holes before him. And to Peter it seemed that there were thousands of men in the place—men who peered out at him derisively and gave long hooting laughs at him.
It was colder inside the prison than outside in the clean air—a dark, dank, penetrating cold combined with the sickly smell of an old cage in which frozen white shoots of growing vegetation killed and preserved by the cold glimmered uncannily in the rank air.
He found the cell that had been his—sixth on the right side. The big door was swung inward. The stone benches inside were black and polished with years of dirt and years of being sat upon. The stained log walls were covered with thousands of marks which recorded days and years spent in the cell by exiles. Among these rows of time-keeping scratches were also etched words of hate and messages of comfort and the scribbled jeers of men who had made a jest of going from such a place to the execution yard.
One line on the wall caught Peter’s eye under the searching beam of his pocket flash light. “God curse Kirsakoff,” Peter read. The letter had been formed by his own boyish fingers with a nail—fingers stiff with cold. He laughed at the sight of it now, and slapped the pistol on his hip under his greatcoat. His laugh came back to him multiplied a hundred times from the cells of the long galleries stretching away in the darkness. The echoes sounded like a scornful chorus from ghosts.
He sat down on the stone bench and looked at the dirty hole in the door through which food had been passed in to him—black bread and greasy soup made from the refuse of cabbages. He sat there several minutes, and threw his memory back to the days and nights which he had spent there buried alive, doubting at times that he existed till food was brought and the rats gathered round him, squeaking for their share.
Fear gripped him. He sprang up and ran, his boots making a clatter over the planks of the broken doors in the passage. He gained the prison yard and his whole body was laved in a sweat of agony. He got out into the open, and stopping an instant to scan the slopes below to see if he had been observed or followed, he turned away to the left to the fenced-in grove which was the old burial ground of the prison.
It was in there that his father had been buried, but Peter did not know where. A few rotten boards lay upon the ground; a few weather-beaten crosses scored and twisted out of shape, littered the ground. Peter stood with tears in his eyes and looked over the rough ground.
“Peter Petrovitch has come back, my father,” he said. And crossing himself, he said a prayer. Then he turned and descended the slopes toward the city, bearing off to the right and trying to make it appear to any watcher that he had been wandering about aimlessly. The thought struck him that he had been unwise in going to the prison. It might lead to gossip, especially when it became known in the city that he was an American. Why should an American officer go prowling about the old prison of a city which——