The Great White Army

by Max Pemberton

Such was the apparition which confronted us in that lonely wood.

Needless to say that we were both greatly moved by it; Léon chiefly, I fear, by the girl's big eyes; I by the wonders of the treasure which lay about her. To go down into the pit and to introduce ourselves was the work of an instant. Léon told her briefly that he was a French officer, and he begged leave to protect her. To this she answered not a word; but I could see that she was not displeased, and presently with a child's laugh she dragged him down beside her.

I know Léon so well, and have seen so many women fall a victim to his pleasing airs that this act did not surprise me as much as it should have done. None the less, I was astonished when presently the girl bade me sit also, and turning to one of the great bags beside her, she produced food and wine and set it before us.

The odd thing was that she could not speak a word of any language with which we tried her.

Of Russian I had learned a few sentences during our stay in Moscow, and German I spoke with some fluency; but neither the one nor the other was the slightest use; nor, need I say, had she any French. Thus we came to signs and mouthing, in which my nephew appeared to be so proficient that he was kissing her within twenty minutes of the encounter and hugging her like a bear before the meal was done.

Well, we finished the meal, and then, pointing to the wood, indicated to the girl that we must go. She had tried to tell us her name, which we made out to be something like Zoida or Zayde, and we asked her as well as we could to accompany us on our road and let us help her with the treasure. The astonishing thing was that she appeared almost indifferent to the existence of the latter, laughing like a child when we pointed to it, and throwing the diamonds about as though they had been pebbles. This angered me, for I saw the worth of the stuff; and presently, speaking in a wrathful tone, I commanded her to pack the things in the box from which they had been taken and to follow us. The new turn appeared to alarm her not a little, and she sat crouching there like a frightened gnome while Léon and I put the things in their cases and began to pack them upon our horses. How they came to be in that remote wood we knew no more than the dead; but it would clearly have been a crime to leave them there, and indeed we had not gone many paces upon the road before the secret of their presence was discovered.

There was at an open glade of the forest a kind of amphitheatre crossed by a road to some southern town.

A wrecked coach stood at the junction, and all about it were the signs of a bloody combat.

I had been riding before the others at this particular moment, and my horse nearly stumbled over the body of an elderly man who had been shot in the head and his brains blown out. Near by lay his coachman, stabbed in many places and quite dead. Of the horses of the coach there was not a trace, and it was now plain to me that the treasure had come from it, and that this elderly man had been escaping southward when the robbers overtook him. Naturally I turned to the girl and began to question her angrily. She merely shook her head and shut her eyes, as though afraid to look upon the corpse. It was to say that she had had no hand in that bloody affair, and so much I could readily believe.

"Good heavens!" said I to Léon, "what an infamy, and more than that, what a mystery!"