"The scoundrel!" cried Vassilissa. "He has the impudence to invite us to lay our flag at his feet, and he doesn't know we have been forty years in the service!"
It was the same when Pugatchéf was actually at our door, and the assault had actually begun. Old Ivan Mironoff blessed his daughter, and embraced his wife, and then faced death. There was no fight in the poor old pensioners who made up our garrison, and both Mironoff and myself were soon captured, bound with ropes, and led before Pugatchéf.
The commandant indignantly refused to swear fidelity to the robber chief, and was hanged there and then in the market square; an old one-eyed lieutenant was soon swinging by his side. Then came my turn, and I gave the same answer as my captain had done. The rope was round my neck, when Pugatchéf shouted out "Stop!" and ordered my release. A few minutes later, and poor old Vassilissa, who had come in search of her husband, was lying dead in the market square, cut down by a Cossack's sword. Pugatchéf's arrival had prevented Marya's escape to Orenburg, and she was now lying too ill to be moved, in the house of Father Garassim, the parish priest.
Pugatchéf gave me leave to depart in safety, but before Savélütch and I left the fort, the rebel bade me come and see him. He laughed aloud when I presented myself.
"Who would have thought," he said, "that the man who guided you to a lodging on that night of the snowstorm was the great tzar himself? But you shall see better things; I will load you with favours when I have recovered my empire."
Then he invited me again and again to enter his service, but I told him I had sworn fidelity to the crown; and finally he let me go, saying: "Either entirely punish or entirely pardon. Tell the officers at Orenburg they may expect me in a week."
It hurt me to leave Marya behind, especially as Pugatchéf had made Chvabrine commandant of the fort, but there was no help for it. Father Garassim and his wife bade me good-bye. "Except you, poor Marya has no longer any protector or comforter," said the priest's wife.
At Orenburg I was in safety, but the town was soon besieged, and I could not persuade the general to sally out and attack the rebels. All through those dreary weeks of the siege I was wondering anxiously about Marya, and then one day when we had been driving off a party of cossacks, one of the rebels, whom I recognised a former soldier at Bélogorsk, lingered to give me a letter. It was from Marya, and she told me that she was now in the house of Chvabrine, who threatened to kill her or hand her over to the robber camp if she did not marry him, and that she had but three days left before her fate would be sealed. Death would be easier, she said, than to be the wife of a man like Chvabrine.
I rushed off at once to the general, and implored him to give me a battalion of soldiers, and let me march on Bélogorsk; but the general only shook his head, and said the expedition was unreasonable.
I decided to go alone and appeal to Pugatchéf, but the faithful Savélütch insisted on accompanying me, and together we arrived at the rebel camp.