"I have no desire to travel with the next caravan to Siberia, with one side of my head and face shaved, and an iron rosary, some five pound weight, at my wrists."
"Fear not—you will never see Siberia."
"Then you have made all sure about this Ivanovitch Balgonie?" said Podatchkine, whose utterance was becoming somewhat inarticulate.
"Ay, sure enough; the cups were——"
"The cups!"
"The cup, I mean, was drugged with those black berries which grow in the forest hereabout; the same stuff used by fine ladies to whiten their hands."
"But why the cup and not the wine?"
"For this reason: I might have been constrained to drink with him; and I had no desire to fall, like some one else, into a trap of my own baiting."
Podatchkine, on whom the powerful soporific with which his cup had been drugged—the sleepy nightshade—had been rapidly taking effect, and whose small cunning eyes had been opening and shutting alternately, while a numbness stole with a weariness over all his faculties, seemed suddenly to grasp at the terrible meaning of the speaker. He gave a start—he essayed to rouse himself and shout, but in doing so, toppled off his stool, and sank on the clay floor in a profound slumber.
"At last!" said the half-breed, administering a kick to the prostrate figure; "at last he has gone to sleep; now to make sure that he shall never waken more. Ah! the Asiatic! he was just getting suspicious at the end."