He snatched the manacles from the guard, tore off her coarse blanket and was reaching for her wrists, when Drexel quickly shouldered in front of him.
“Wait, colonel. I’ll make her obey!”
He seized the lantern and held it before him, so standing that his body blocked the governor’s sight of the blanched head on the pillow.
“You hear me—hold out your hands!” he commanded in a voice that would have been a credit to Captain Laroque himself.
She gazed up at him with her calm defiance; then the lips slowly parted, and a dazed, marvelling look came into the gray old eyes. Then her face was as calm as before.
Slowly she stretched out her thin white wrists.
Her legs were not put in chains. They were already sufficiently shackled by disease. With a show of roughness, but with infinite care, Drexel lifted the frail figure from the bed and placed it in the chair. Then he wheeled her into the corridor.
The dungeon of Razoff was next entered. To him, too, Drexel covertly revealed himself; and a few minutes later, irons on hands and feet, he was waiting in the corridor beside The White One.
Thus far all had gone with the smoothness of a wish. The governor now unlocked a third door. “Here are the condemned ones—all together,” said he.
They entered, followed by the guards. In the days before the Fortress had become a political prison, this gloomy dungeon had been a casemate, and the one window through the five feet of solid masonry had been the embrasure through which had looked forth the muzzle of a great cannon. Beneath the window, on the bed, her brother’s arm about her, sat Sonya. Drexel’s heart gave a leap. His feverish gaze saw naught but her.