“Then perhaps we may both go,” said Katerin. “We would be in no greater danger if we tried to find the American than if we waited here for Zorogoff.”
“We shall stay here,” said Michael. “I am too old and wise to be fooled by Mongol tricks. If I knew you could be safe I would be happy to say farewell to you forever—but God tells me that we are in greater danger now than ever, and we must trust no one. Come! Hand me my pen again, that I may write down the things you should remember when I am dead.”
XI
THE FLIGHT
WASSILI lurked in front of the sobrania from midnight till near morning. There was a ball going on inside the building and many people coming and going during the night, mostly officers of Zorogoff’s forces and their women. But Wassili saw nothing of Ilya, though he gossiped with the droshky-drivers about the sobrania, warming himself against the biting cold by frequent drinks of tea at a restaurant across the street.
When he had almost decided to return to Kirsakoff and report that he had not seen Ilya, he heard that Ilya had been killed. Then Wassili gathered such details as he could, and along toward morning hastened homeward with his story.
Katerin saw the disaster in the moujik’s face when he appeared at the door of her room, breathing hard from a run up the stairs. His hands were covered with candle wax as a result of their shaking.
“What news, Wassili?” she cried.
“The Cossacks killed Ilya soon after he left this house, mistress,” panted Wassili. “He crossed an old garden to evade the sentries, and did not stop when they halted him. He fell with six bullets in him—and they say in the city that he was a spy, for he carried a secret message.”
“Your message to the American,” said Michael, who had waited up for the return of Wassili. “It is as I said—Ilya was bait for the Ataman’s trap. There is no American. If you had gone with Ilya you would have been seized, my daughter, and if I had gone, I would have been shot down. We are lost—the story about the American was a myth to draw us from the house.”