When that night the weary four sat huddled together and blanketed to the ears on the frozen plain, Lowiez, who since his first venture and rebuke had offered no remonstrance, suggested that the early morning ought to see them well on the way to the Vistula, and then homeward bound.
“We won’t get anywhere, sergeant,” asserted Billy, upholding Lowiez, “if we wait until the petrol’s all gone—and another day without filling, that will be exactly the condition.”
“Have it over, then, as you will. If you know the way, take it.”
Strogoff had spoken, and resignedly.
When they slept, or how long, none of the party could have told, at first awakening. Their disturbance it was that filled the full measure of mind.
Billy was picked for the initial shock. He opened his eyes against the nose of a horse! That a Cossack was looking at him from higher up did not serve, either, to reduce his pulse rate.
A prod with a lance put Henri in the line of sitting up and taking notice, and similar applications hastened wakefulness on the part of both Strogoff and Lowiez.
“Filimonoff!”
This cry of recognition from Lowiez.
One of the greatest of all Cossacks—Michail Filimonoff, of whom the boys had heard so much in Galicia—the man “who sits his horse like a Petrograd bank clerk, but leads like the devil.”