In the Track of the Troops

by R. M. Ballantyne

Evening was setting in when he made this discovery, and recoiled, happily without having been seen, into a narrow rocky place where the fast-failing light had already deepened into gloom. A cold white fog was slowly creeping up from the valleys and covering the hill-sides.

It is in such places and circumstances that men conceive and execute designs, which, according to their nature, are deeds of recklessness or of heroism. Two such ventures were afoot that night.

In the Russian camp preparations were being made for a night attack on a village in possession of the Turks, and out of which, with a view to future movements, it was deemed necessary to drive them. In this village there dwelt a youth, an intimate friend of Dobri Petroff. The two had played with each other in childhood, had roamed about the country together in boyhood, and, when they reached man’s estate, had become faster friends than ever, being bound by the ties of intellectual as well as physical sympathy. When this friend, Petko Borronow, left Yenilik at the death of his mother, it was to take charge of the little farm in the Balkan mountains,—the desolate home where his sister Giuana, an invalid, and a beautiful girl, was now left in solitude.

In his capacity of scout, Petroff was always in the neighbourhood of headquarters, and was frequently summoned to the tent of the general commanding, to be interrogated. Thus he chanced to overhear occasional remarks and hints which, when pieced together by his intelligent mind, showed him pretty clearly what was pending.

He sat by the camp-fire that night, buried in meditation, with a series of troubled wrinkles on a brow that was usually open and unclouded. Many a time did he light his pipe and forget to smoke it, and relight it, and again let it die out, until his comrades were impressed by his absence of mind. Well did the scout know by that time the certain fate of a village which was to be fought for by contending armies. To warn his friend Borronow in time to remove his sister from the doomed village became to the scout a duty which must be performed at all hazards, but how to do this without deserting his post, and appearing to go over to the enemy, was the difficulty.

“Something troubles you,” said his young friend André Vanovitch, who had for some time sat smoking quietly at his side, gazing into the fire, and thinking, no doubt, of the girl with the auburn hair, far away in the land of the Muscove.

“Yes, I’m troubled about friends,” was the scout’s laconic answer.

“Oh! they’re all right, you may be sure, now that our fellows have crossed the Danube in such force,” said André, supposing that the other referred to his family.

“Perhaps!” returned Petroff, and relapsed into silence.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he had overheard some expression among the officers around the General of a desire to know more particularly about the disposition of the Turkish force, and the suggestion that a spy should be sent out. His brow cleared at once; with almost a triumphant look on his countenance, he turned sharply to André, and seized his arm.