“To inquire about my friend Nicholas Karanovitsch,” I said.
From the sudden disappearance of the look of careless pleasantry from my friend’s face, and the grave earnest tone in which he spoke, I saw that he had bad news to tell.
“Have you not heard—” he said, and paused.
“Not dead?” I exclaimed.
“No, not dead, but desperately wounded.” He went on in a low rapid voice to relate all the circumstances of the case, with which the reader is already acquainted, first touching on the chief points, to relieve my feelings.
Nicholas was not dead, but so badly wounded that there was no chance of his ever again attaining to the semblance of his old self. The doctors, however, had pronounced him at last out of danger. His sound constitution and great strength had enabled him to survive injuries which would have carried off most men in a few days or hours. His whole frame had been shattered; his handsome face dreadfully disfigured, his left hand carried away, and his right foot so grievously crushed by a gun-carriage passing over it that they had been obliged to amputate the leg below the knee. For a long time he had lain balancing between life and death, and when he recovered sufficiently to be moved had been taken by rail to Switzerland. He had given strict orders that no one should be allowed to write to his friends in England, but had asked very anxiously after me.
Biquitous gave me a great many more particulars, but this was the gist of his sad news. He also told me of the fall of Dobri Petroff.
“Nicholas had fainted, as I told you,” he said, “just before the picket by which he had been rescued lifted him from the ground, and he was greatly distressed, on recovering, to find that his faithful follower had been left behind. Although he believed him to be dead, he immediately expressed an earnest wish that men should be sent to look for and recover the body. They promised that this should be done, but he never learned whether or not they had been successful.”
“And you don’t know the name of the place in Switzerland to which Nicholas has been sent?” I asked.
“Not sure, but I think it was Montreux, on the Lake of Geneva.”