“Say, how is he?” he asked anxiously.
“He is alive,” came the Duke’s quiet reassurance, “we must be thankful that you only struck him with that small marlinspike. If it had been an iron bar his head would have cracked like an eggshell. How did he come to be in Russia, Simon?”
“He came over to look for us. I thought Valeria Petrovna had got you both safe out of it until he turned up in Kiev yesterday. He planned your escape. Is he badly hurt?”
“I can find no cut on his head — his hat saved him, I think — the blood is only from his nose.”
“How on earth did it happen?”
“It was in those darned caves,” Rex explained. “They sure gave me the shivers — stuffed full of corpses propped up against the walls. Our light died on us — then it was hell! I’ll tell the world — so hot we couldn’t breathe, too. I figured we were there for keeps, but we spotted a guy coming down the corridor. I bumped him, and the Duke snatched his light.”
“He must have got worried when you didn’t turn up and gone down to look for you.”
“It was fortunate for us that he did,” commented the Duke. “If he had not we should have died for a certainty. I was afraid, too, that if we got out you would not be there. Leshkin has been to Moscow and seen Stalin; you were to have been arrested again tonight!”
Simon laughed jerkily.
“It’s a fact,” added Rex; “the old baby-killer told us that himself. There was going to be a shooting party for the bunch of us tomorrow!”