Nathan had been in scores of such lost Siberian villages. One long, wide, muddy street of log huts with acres of sapling-fenced cattle pens behind: they were all alike. Two big beacons were afire before the largest house in the place, half-way up a slight incline on the right.
“You come!” ordered the Cossack.
Nathan almost fell to the ground when first his weight bore upon his stiffened leg. He groaned with the pain. But he was immediately grabbed and jostled forward. In behind the twisted fence he was hurried, while aroused villagers, a tatterdemalion crew, gathered from fifty directions.
The room into which he was pushed was low-studded and rough-hewn. Candle-lighted, its corners and furnishings were mostly in shadow. At a rough plank table in the center sat a bear of a man in a great ulster with a fur hat like a drum major’s. He had immense black whiskers—in which he might easily have lost articles of small compass such as stub pencils, cigar holders, toothpicks, pipe-stems, and never found them again—and those whiskers were finished off at the top with the longest, wildest, most wonderful pair of mustaches that Nathan dreamed could ever adhere to a male countenance and allow that male to preserve any semblance of Dignity. But there was not an inkling of doubt about the Dignity of this bear-like Commandant. It was immense, and the whiskers and mustaches did it. He took great pride in his whiskers and mustaches. Undoubtedly they had been responsible for his elevation to Commandant. A man with such stupendous hirsute adornments could be nothing less. And in further proof that he was a truly great man, across and about both breasts was a display of moth-eaten medals and badges that made his chest resemble the souvenir board of a street fakir at an Elks Field Day or Fireman’s Muster, back in Vermont.
A half-dozen of the bear’s “staff” were gathered in distressing Dignity also about the table as Nat was brought forward. They too were high-hatted and bewhiskered, though not so terrifically as the Commandant. There was but one set of such whiskers on earth, and they were upon the Commandant’s countenance. One man had a big, greasy book open before him. He appeared to be “clerk” of this Inquisition. When he wrote in the book, he put his tongue in his cheek and lowered his accipitral nose within four inches of his writing. He had hands like boxing gloves. The panther-like Cossack continued to act as interpreter.
“Now—you tell Commandant where you go,” he ordered.
“Moscow to Harbin, then to America,” declared Nathan hoarsely. The stolid ring of Tartar faces drew close to the candle-light.
“You been with Czecho-slovak—yist?”
“I passed through their lines,” assented the Yankee.
“Where you pass through lines?”