“Perhaps not. But even if so, far better be arrested in Prince Berloff’s house, than by those Cossacks in this desert spot.”
The countess, her head turned backwards, saw Drexel’s death, her fortune, gain upon them—and no chance of escape before him. He was as thoroughly trapped in this vast, open country as though he were locked in a narrow dungeon in the granite heart of a prison-fortress.
At the moment the Cossacks had come galloping out of the forest that peculiar emotional excitement that had possessed the countess all day had suddenly leaped to a thousandfold its former keenness. As the Cossacks gained, the feeling had grown more intense. She did not try to analyze that feeling; had she, she would have thought it born of the thrill of the death-moment riding so hard behind.
As the Cossacks sounded closer, closer, as her well-plotted success drew nearer, nearer, she grew weak, and her strange feeling swirled dizzily within her. And still it had no meaning.
One hundred yards.
“Stop—or we fire!” boomed across the night in a deep and powerful voice.
The moonlight, shining straight into the speaker’s bearded face, corroborated the voice. Drexel saw the leader was Captain Nadson.
And he was all but in that man’s hands. For an instant he thought what his capture would mean to Sonya!
“Take the lines, countess,” he said sharply. “Now crouch down in the body of the sleigh, so there’ll be less danger of your being hit.” He himself huddled on the floor, his face toward the Cossacks, his Browning pistol drawn.
For a moment the countess—“the cleverest, keenest, most heartless woman spy in Russia”—sat crouching in the bottom of the sleigh, reeling, appalled. The captain’s cry, “Stop, or we fire!” was to her the beginning of the death climax, and this nearness of the end revealed to her, as though by a flash of lightning, the meaning of her all-day’s strange excitement and of her present wild emotion—and the revelation froze her soul with horror.