“Well,” he replied, “I happen to have rather good reason to know him. In Odessa he was chief of a desperate gang of bank-note forgers, who, after eluding us for two years, were at last arrested—six of them in Moscow. The seventh, who called himself Müller, escaped to Germany. A year ago he was bold enough to return to Petersburg, where I recognised him one day close to the Nicholas station and followed him to the house where he lodged. I entered there alone, very foolishly perhaps, whereupon he drew a revolver and fired point-blank at me. The bullet struck me in the right shoulder, but assistance was forthcoming, and he was arrested. His sentence about eleven months ago was confinement in the Fortress of Peter and Paul for fifteen years. So he must have escaped. Ah! he was one of the most daring, astute and desperate criminals in all Russia. At his trial he spat at the judge, and contemptuously declared that his friends would not allow him to be confined for very long.”
“It seems that they have not,” I remarked thoughtfully. “The fact of his having dared to break into the house of the chief of police shows in itself the character of the man,” Petrakoff exclaimed. “I myself had a most narrow escape when I arrested him. But what was he doing here—in Siberia?”
“He may have been exiled here and escaped,” remarked the chief of police, as we were returning to the bureau at the side of the house.
“I hardly think that, Excellency,” interrupted a Cossack sergeant, who had just returned from the post-station, where he had been making inquiries. “We have just arrested a yamshick, who arrived with the assassin an hour after midnight. Here he is.”
A moment later a big, red-faced, shaggy, vodka-drinking driver in ragged furs was brought into the bureau between two Cossacks, and at once interrogated by the chief of police.
First he was taken out to view the body still lying in the snow; then brought back into the police office, a bare, wooden room, lit by a single petroleum lamp, and bearing on its walls posters of numbers of official regulations, each headed by the big black double eagle.
“Now,” asked the chief of police, assuming an air of great severity, “where do you come from?”
“Krasnoyarsk, Excellency,” answered the man gruffly.
“What do you know of the individual you have just seen dead—eh?”
“All I know of him, Excellency, is that he contracted with me to drive him to Yakutsk.”