The Price of Power Part 32

"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 Muller, 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sa.s.sin an hour after midnight. Here he is."

A moment later a big, red-faced, s.h.a.ggy, 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, a.s.suming 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."

"Why? Was he quite alone?"

"Yes, Excellency. He made me hurry, driving night and day sometimes, for he was overtaking a friend."

"What friend?"

"Ah! I do not know. Only at each stancia, or povarnia, he inquired if an Englishman had pa.s.sed. Therefore I concluded that it was an Englishman he was following."

Petrakoff, hearing the man's words, looked meaningly towards me.

"He was alone, you say?" I inquired. "Had he any friends in Krasnoyarsk, do you know?"

"None that I know of. He had journeyed all the way from Petersburg, and he paid me well, because he was travelling so rapidly. We heard of the Englishman at a number of stancias, and have gradually overtaken him, until we found, on arrival here, that the friend he sought had only come in an hour before us. I heard the post-house keeper tell him so."

"Then he was following this mysterious Englishman--eh?" asked the chief of police, who had seated himself at his table with some officiousness before commencing the inquiry.

"No doubt he was, Excellency. One day he told me that if he did not overtake the Englishman on his way to Yakutsk, he would remain and wait for his return."

Then I took a couple of steps forward to the official's table and said:

"I fear that I must be the Englishman whom this mysterious person has followed in such hot haste for nearly six thousand miles."

"So it seems. But why?" asked the chief of police. "I can see no reason why that escaped criminal should follow you with such sinister intent. You don't know him?"

"Not in the least. I have never even heard his name before."

"He was well supplied with money, it seems," remarked my host. "This wallet found upon him contains over ten thousand roubles in notes, together with a credit upon the branch of the National Bank in Yakutsk for a further thirty thousand." And he showed me a well-worn leather pocket-book, evidently of German manufacture.

Both Petrakoff and myself knew only too well that this daring criminal had been released from that cold citadel in the Nevi and given money, promised a free pardon in all probability, if he followed me and at all hazards prevented me from obtaining an interview with the poor, innocent, suffering woman whose dastardly enemy had marked her "dangerous."

I was about to tell the while scandalous truth, but on second thought I saw that no good could be served. Therefore I held my tongue, and allowed the officials--for the starosti of the village had now arrived-- regard the affair as a complete mystery.

I had narrowly escaped death, the doctor had declared, and my friend, the chief of police of Olekminsk, kept the unfortunate yamshick under arrest while he reported the extraordinary affair to Yakutsk. He also confiscated the money found upon the man who had made that daring attack upon me.

I could see he was secretly delighted that the criminal had been killed.

What, I wondered, would have happened to him if I, a guest of His Imperial Majesty, had lost my life beneath his roof?

The same thought apparently crossed his mind, for in those white winter days I was compelled to remain his guest, being unfit for travel on account of my wound, he many times referred to the narrow escape I had had.

Petrakoff, on his part, related to us some astounding stories of the man, who hid been known to the coining and note-forging fraternity as Muller, _alias_ Pa.s.shin, the man who had at least three murders to his record.

And this man was Markoff's hireling! What, I wondered, was the actual price placed upon my head?

For a whole week--seven weary days--I was compelled to remain there in Olekminsk. I wanted to push forward, but the exiled doctor would not allow it.

There was a small and wretched colony of political exiles in the village, and I visited them. Fancy a poet and _litterateur_, one of those rare Russian souls whose wonder-working effusions must ultimately enlighten and enfranchise the people--a Turgenieff--immured for life in that snowy desert. Yet in Olekminsk there was such a one. He lived in a wretched one-roomed, log-built cabin within a stone's-throw of the house wherein I so nearly lost my life--a tall, alert, deep-eyed man, whom even the savagery of his surroundings could not dispirit or cool the ardour of his wonderful genius. From his prolific pen flowed a ceaseless stream of learning and of light; he wrote and wrote, and in this writing forgot his wrongs and sorrows. The authorities--the local officials who wield such autocratic authority in those parts--were overjoyed to see him in this mood. They fostered his rich whim, they encouraged him to write his books, the ma.n.u.scripts of which they seized and sold in Petersburg and Berlin, Paris and London.

Yet he lived in a smoky, wooden hovel, banked up by snow, and wrote his books upon a rough wooden bench, which was polished at the spot over which his forearm travelled with his pen.

No exile, I found, was allowed to carry on any business, teach in a school, till the soil, labour at a trade, practise a profession, or engage in any work otherwise than through a master. If I wanted any service, an exile would sometimes come and offer to perform it, but I would have to pay his master, upon whose bounty he must depend for remuneration.

The doctor, named Kasharofski who bandaged me was not a revolutionist, or at all intemperate in his political view's. He was one of the thousands of Markoff's victims sacrificed in order that the Chief of Secret Police should remain in favour with the Emperor. Therefore he was not in favour with many of his fellow-exiles, who held p.r.o.nounced revolutionary views. He was on pleasant visiting terms with the chief of police, and I often went to his wretched, carpetless hut, around which were sleeping bunks, and spent many an hour with him listening to the cruel, inhuman wrong from which he had suffered at the hands of that marvellously alert organisation, the Secret Police.

One grey, snowy afternoon, while I sat with him in his bare wooden hut, one room with benches around for beds, and he smoked a cigar I had given him, he burst forth angrily against the exile system, declaring: "The whole government is a monstrous mistake. Russia has been striding in vain to populate Siberia for a thousand years, but she will never succeed so long as she continues in her present policy of converting the land into a vast penitentiary wherein the prisoners are prevented from making an honest livelihood, and so driven, if criminals, to a further commission of crime. Beyond doubt there are rogues of the very worst type in Russia and Siberia, but certainly it is plain that their mode of punishment will never tend to elevate or reform them; further, it is utterly impossible that Siberia, under its present system of government, should ever be populated or improved, as have been the penal colonies of the French and English."

His words were, alas! too true. What I had seen of Siberia and its exile system--those terrible prisons where men and women were herded together and infected with typhoid and smallpox; those wretched hovels of the political settlement, and those chained gangs of despairing prisoners on the roads--had indeed filled me with horror. The condition of those exiles, both socially and morally, was utterly appalling.

The day after my conversation with Doctor Kasharofski, after a week of irritating delay, in which every moment I feared that I was losing valuable time, I set forth again upon my last stage, the journey of four hundred miles of snow-covered tundra and forests of cheerless silver birch to Yakutsk.

Did Madame de Rosen still live, or had Markoff taken good care that, even though I escaped the a.s.sa.s.sin's knife, I should never meet her again in the flesh?

Ay, that was the one important question. And my heart beat quickly as, bidding farewell to my hospitable friend, the chief of police, our three s.h.a.ggy horses plunged jingling away into the snow.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

THE JOURNEY'S END.

The farther north we pushed, the worse became the roads, and snow fell daily. Only by following the line of telegraph and the verst-posts could we find the road, which sometimes ran along the Lena valley, and at others crossed high hills or penetrated deep, gloomy forests of dwarfed leafless trees.

After three days we approached a high mountain range, where absolute silence reigned and the snowfall was constant and heavy. The trees were so overburdened with the white weight softly and quietly heaped upon them, that many had broken down completely and obstructed the wild road through the forest. Vasilli had furnished us with hatchets for this purpose, and we were often compelled to stop and hack and drag the fallen trees from our path.

When at last we had gained the top of the mountain pa.s.s, we at once felt a complete change in the atmosphere. Whereas to the south everything was as calm as the quiet of death, in front of us a gale was already blowing, and instead of trees bowed down and breaking with their burden of snow, to the northward of the mountain range not a single flake appeared on the shrubbery or woodland.

We had pa.s.sed from the world of silence to the wild, bleak regions of the Arctic blizzard. All that day we toiled through deep snow, the mountain road rugged beyond description and the tearing wind icy and howling. It blew as though it would never calm. And the distance between the two lonely post-houses was one hundred and twenty-four English miles. Not a vestige of a habitation between. All was a great lone land.

The frost was intense, and icicles hung from Vasilli's beard and from our own moustaches--a black deadly cold, rendered the more biting by the wind straight from the Polar ice-pack.

I looked up upon that awful snow-covered road and shuddered. Luba and her mother had actually traversed it on foot. Because they had been marked as "dangerous" the Cossack captain had exposed them to that terrible suffering, hoping that they would thereby die before reaching Yakutsk--in which case he would, no doubt, receive a word of commendation from the Governor.