Yes, I must for the future “choose the page’s part,” and, if she should ever have need of me, I would serve her, and take that for my reward!
I fell asleep on that thought, and only woke—feeling fairly fit, despite the dull ache in my head and the throbbing of the flesh wound in my shoulder—when we reached Dunaburg, and the cars were shunted to a siding.
Mishka turned up again, and insisted on valeting me after a fashion, though I told him I could manage perfectly well by myself. I had come out of the affair better than most of the passengers, for my baggage had been in the rear part of the train, and by the time I got to the hotel, close to the station, was already deposited in the rooms that, I found, had been secured for me in advance.
I had just finished the light meal which was all Dr. Nabokof would allow me, when Mishka announced “Count Solovieff,” and the Grand Duke Loris entered.
“Please don’t rise, Mr. Wynn,” he said in English. “I have come to thank you for your timely aid. You are better? That is good. You got a nasty knock on the head just at the end of the fun, which was much too bad! It was a jolly good fight, wasn’t it?”
He laughed like a schoolboy at the recollection; his blue eyes shining with sheer glee, devoid of any trace of the ferocity that usually marks a Russian’s mirth.
“That’s so,” I conceded. “And fairly long odds; two unarmed men against a crowd with knives and bludgeons. Why don’t you carry a revolver, sir?”
“I do, as a rule. Why don’t you?”
“Because I guess it would have been confiscated at the frontier. I’m a civilian, and—I’ve been in Russia before! But if you’d had a six-shooter—”