The man flashed a shrewd glance at his visitor; but though he said nothing on the point, he was apparently making a note of something in his mind.
"Well, you leave it to me, barm," he said. "When I take a job in hand, my motto's 'thorough', it is. And mind you: when I see you next, another bottle of this vodka: that won't ruin a barin with two hundred roubles at the superintendent's office and ten in his own pocket, eh?"
A few minutes later Sowinski left the hut and stumbled out into the darkness—down the hill, dotted with rude huts dimly discernible in the gloom, towards the little bay where half a dozen junks engaged in the herring fishery lay at anchor. The road was broken by ruts and pitfalls; unconsciously the Pole groped his way over or past them, busy with his thoughts, which were blacker than the night, hurrying him to a deeper pitfall dug by himself for his own undoing.
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Empty Hut
My Son—Liberty in Sight—Au Revoir!—Suspense—The Open Door—A Footprint—The Trail
While Sowinski was making his way down the hill, a sampan with two passengers put off in dead silence from one of the junks in the roadstead. The vessel had arrived that afternoon with a small cargo of rice; she was to ship a consignment of dried fish for Chifu. The loading was to be commenced at dawn on the following day; she was not to carry a full cargo, having to fill up with coal at Alexandrovsk; by the evening it was expected that her consignment would be on board, and she would sail again next morning.
The sampan moved without a splash towards the northern end of the bay, where there were no huts. The fishing settlement extended half round the southern end, and the lumber yards occupied the rest of the southern quarter and part of the northern. It was a very solitary spot at which the passengers landed, and the sampan-man—who happened also to be the owner of the junk—steering his little craft between two rocks, where he was secure from observation, squatted motionless, apparently awaiting the return of the two men whom he had just put ashore.
Making a circuit round the lumber settlement—a somewhat difficult matter in the dark—the two passengers, one of whom evidently knew the way and walked a pace or two in advance, stopped at a hut a little larger than the majority of those they had passed, and gently tapped at the door. No light was visible; the taller of the two men cleared his throat as in nervous impatience. A step was heard within; the door was opened, and a voice asked in Russian:
"Who is there?"