XXIII A LIFE FOR A LIFE

WHEN he heard his own name uttered by Shimilin as the Cossack captain departed, Michael locked his grip upon the ends of the blanket as if against a blow. A startled moan broke from his lips, an expression of horror that at last Peter would know him.

Peter turned upon the old man swiftly, alert at once and his own hand dropping to the butt of his pistol.

“I—I am revealed to you!” whispered Michael, thrusting his head forward toward Peter.

“And before you were ready, eh?” said Peter. “But you thought you could fool me, Michael Alexandrovitch, before——”

Kirsakoff made a quick flick of his right hand, and there dropped down from the sleeve of his shirt a small derringer. The weapon fell into his hand, and he made a movement to adjust it for use. But Peter was too quick for him, and before Michael could get proper hold of it, much less aim it, Peter had leaped upon the old man and pinioned his arms against his sides.

“So the old wolf has a snap left in him yet,” taunted Peter, as he bore the frail Michael back against the table and wrested the derringer from his fingers. Michael made no struggle, but relaxed in Peter’s hands, and when released, sank weakly to his knees.

Peter pocketed the derringer, and then leaned down to Michael.

“You would kill me, would you? You have not forgotten your tricks, Michael! Perhaps you came prepared to kill me! So the escape to Harbin was all pretty talk, to throw me off my guard that you might——”

“Mercy!” gasped Michael. “Mercy for my daughter’s sake—I ask none for myself!”

“You have discovered mercy. Who called for mercy for Peter Petrovitch twenty years ago when you ordered him and his father sent to prison—and then his father was cut down by your Cossacks? Answer me that?”

“If my daughter were safe from the Ataman, you could take your vengeance,” said Michael simply. “I have lived beyond——”

“Oh, hush!” cried Peter angrily, clapping his hand over Michael’s mouth. He slipped his fingers under the folds of the bandage about Michael’s face, and slipped it back over his head, pulling it upward from the chin.

“Let me see your face, Michael! It has been a long time since we looked at one another—and each knew the other. On that day you were the bold, brave Governor, surrounded by your soldiers. Life was cheap then—to you. Come! Stand upon your feet like a man!” And Peter lifted him up against the table.

“I have no fear of death,” said Michael proudly.

“No,” said Peter, laughing. “You are so ready to meet death that you tie your face up in rags. But you look like yourself, Michael! Yes, I would have known you but for the rags. Life is not so strong in you, now, it is true, but you are the same, yes.”

Peter stood before him, with folded arms, and scanned Michael’s face with reflective memory. He spoke quietly, almost soothingly, and his face was lighted by his joyful exultation. He thought of nothing but that his triumph had come, and he cared for nothing but that he should drink his fill of the wine of revenge.

“I am helpless now—an old man,” said Michael. “But I can die—Gorekin.”

“I suppose you can,” said Peter, “much as you would throw away a lemon that had been sucked dry. But I am thinking now of my father, twenty years ago. You were brave with his life, too—and mine! I was a helpless boy and you left me in your filthy prison. I might be there now for all you cared.”

“Do your will with me,” said Michael wearily.

Peter put a hand upon his shoulder, and bent his body back, so that he might peer into the old man’s eyes in better light.

“You have not lost your cunning, Michael. I can see it still in your eyes, faded as they are. You thought that I, Peter Petrovitch, would save your life—I, who have come half way round the world to take it, I, who have waited twenty years to see the breath leave your body!”

“To save my daughter, yes,” said Michael.

“Ha! Do you not see the divinity behind all this? You run squealing to an American officer to save you from your Cossacks—and the American is Peter Petrovitch! And now that your own skin is threatened, you plead for life because of your daughter! Did you give my father a chance to plead for his son? Michael, I am the boy who saw his father die in the snow before the post-house—and you come now seeking my protection from the Ataman——”

“A half-blood Mongol,” put in Michael. “I would save my daughter from a Mongol—for myself I ask nothing. And I would kill you if I had the power——”

“Stop! I shall do the talking!” Peter’s body trembled with his rage. All the hatred which he had built up in twenty years, all the concentrated venom in his soul against Kirsakoff was now diffusing through his body and poisoning his brain. He lunged at Michael, and took the frail old body in his arms, swinging him upward from the floor as a child might be lifted in play by its father.

“Come!” commanded Peter, looking down into the white face of Michael. “I will show you your Valley of Despair! I will show you the spot before the old post-house where I watched my father pour out his blood into the snow! I will show you where Peter Petrovitch, who now holds you in his arms, could but scream in terror against you and your Cossacks—and vow to have your life!”

He turned with Michael, and thrust the old man’s face against the pane of the window, holding him high enough so that he could see over the stratum of frost on the lower part of the glass.

“Look, Michael Alexandrovitch! Up the Sofistkaya! The post-house where the mail-sledges stopped when they came in from Irkutsk! That is the spot! And I cannot even find the bones of my beloved father in the old cemetery by the prison on the hill. And below—the little hut where Gorekin the bootmaker lived! See it? The chimney and a part of the old roof. It has taken twenty years for God to put you in my hands—twenty years, before He has let you, a leaf which is ready to fall, come into my power. Can you doubt that He let you live that I might show you where you stood one cold morning, master of lives in the Valley of Despair and death waiting the snap of your finger? Times have changed, Michael. The light has come to Russia—a new day, and for such as you who gave us but black despair, black night has come. And justice without mercy!”

Peter swung round from the window and threw Michael upon his feet. The old general swayed dizzily and saved himself from falling by grasping at the table. Peter stood glowering, arms hanging out from his sides with fingers widespread as if he were about to seize Michael again.

“You shall have your vengeance!” cried Michael, and held up an arm to restrain Peter for a time.

“Oh, shall I?” asked Peter sneeringly, a crooked smile playing at the side of his mouth. “Perhaps you covered your face that I might have my vengeance! Did you plan to take me to Harbin to find Kirsakoff? Did you put Wassili behind my chair with a knife to——?”

“Give heed to my words!” pleaded Michael in a passionate outburst. “I will bargain with you!”

Peter laughed at him.

“Bargain! Why should I buy what I already have?”

“Look!” Michael held forth his hand to Peter. Between the fingers was a small white pellet.

“And what is that?” asked Peter.

“I could still defeat you, Gorekin. This is a poison tablet—quick as a bullet or a blade.”

“For me, Michael? Is it for me?” sneered Peter.

“No, for myself. I can die by my own hand quicker than you can fire your pistol—and you must shoot quickly, or even the Ataman will defeat your purpose with me. But I would bargain with you, Gorekin.”

“To what end?” asked Peter, somewhat amused, and curious as to the old man’s intent. “What have you to sell, Michael?”

“I will sell you my life,” said Kirsakoff.

“I can have your life for the taking.”

“No. Look! I hold the tablet six inches from my mouth. I could be dead before your bullet would reach me.”

“I like to hear your voice, Michael—speaking of your own death. Well, have your say out.”

“You are a Russian, and you must have your blood amend, Gorekin. You shall have it—I shall not destroy myself—but I ask you to save Katerin from the Ataman. That is my bargain.”

“My father and I could not bargain, twenty years ago out there in the Sofistkaya.”

“True. But I offer you now a life for a life—and a clean slate between the two of us. My blood for your father’s blood—and go your way in peace.”

Michael leaned forward eagerly. Peter’s expression had changed so that the old man had hope, but Peter was merely astounded by Michael’s proposal. This was something he had not looked for in the old man—a calm willingness to take death as part of a trade, an exchange of favors.

“The old wolf has not lost his craft,” said Peter.

“The lion returns to the lair where he was whelped,” said Michael. “What I was, I was, and done is done. What I offer is nothing, true—but you may fail in your vengeance. Rather I would make it sure for you—and go to meet the dead with no debt to living man.”

“And how is it to be done?” asked Peter. He still suspected that Michael sought to escape him by a stratagem.

“With this!” exclaimed Michael, and with his left hand he drew from the breast of his shirt a small slender object, one part red and one part white, and held it forth to Peter. “Take this, Gorekin—I put vengeance into your hand—if you will save Katerin from the Mongol.”

Peter drew near and looked at what Michael held. It was a cased dagger—a leather case of red, surmounted by a hilt of yellowed old ivory and a steel hand guard at the base of the hilt. It was the weapon of Chinese assassins, an instrument made for but a single crime for it was cupped under the hilt guard in such a way that it sealed the very wound it made. Peter knew at once what it was and what it would do.

“Give me the promise—and take the knife!” entreated Michael. “One Russian to another—to save Katerin from the Mongol!”

“And what should I do with it?” asked Peter, seeking to draw out the old general.

“What should you do? What else, but thrust it into my heart—and take my daughter away from the city? Come! Your word! Give it and strike quickly, or the Ataman will defeat you!”

“You know well I could not escape, leaving you dead in my room,” jeered Peter. “What would I gain? If I strike now—here—my vengeance will be a short joy. It is so much simpler to turn you over to Shimilin.”

“By the Holy Saints!” cried Michael in disgust. “Has the blood of a Russian turned to water so that he will not kill on his own honor’s account? Please! Take this blade!”

Michael drew the hilt away from the leather case and exposed a polished shaft of steel, white and glittering in the light from the windows—a weapon of exquisite daintiness, with a round blade, slightly curved.

“Look at it!” urged Michael. “It is cupped at the hilt, and if you do not draw it once you have struck, it will let away no blood. What more could you desire?”

Peter regarded him with thoughtful eyes.

Michael threw aside the leathern case, and pulled his shirt open at the neck, exposing his withered chest.

“Say the promise—and strike quickly while I pray,” he begged. “See! It is a gentle weapon—so sharp and smooth that it will cause me little discomfort. And then you may say I did it, which will leave you without blame.”

For an instant Peter thought Michael to be mad. But it was plain enough that the simplicity of the old man in his appeal for death was but his surrender to the inevitable.

Peter knew the lucidity of mind which comes with the agony of spirit. He knew how Michael’s mind was working. The old man was in the grip of that clarity of mental vision which comes to the drowning man, or to the man who walks to execution. Peter had experienced the same phenomenon as he watched his father die twenty years before. The trivial things of every day, things never noticed before, had stood out with amazing distinctness and had registered in his brain a picture which had never vanished.

Peter remembered now the tiny stone he had seen in the snow near his dying father; the Cossack’s boot which had been deeply scratched; the odor of raw fur from the sledges—even now the pungent scent was in his nostrils. The scene recurred to him now with overpowering intensity, and once more his old rage against Michael mounted. He reached forward and snatched the dagger from Michael’s fingers.

“Good!” cried Michael. “You will promise—and strike!”

Then the old general began to whisper a prayer, and stretched out his arms, like a great bat preparing for flight.

Peter held the dagger in his hand, palm upward, and slightly extended before him, so that his elbow was a right angle with his upper arm, a pose somewhat similar to a man who holds a rapier in low carte ready to thrust forward the point. And he was close enough to Michael, so that if the arm was extended, the dagger would reach the old man.

While the two of them were thus confronting each other, a low scream broke upon the room—a full-throated cry of sudden and complete horror.

Peter turned to see Katerin in the door which led to the Kirsakoffs’ rooms. Her hands were thrown up and pressed against her cheeks, her staring eyes fastened upon the dagger in Peter’s hands, her mouth still open with the horror of her cry, and her body transfixed into rigidity by the astounding situation in which she found her father and Peter. The catastrophe which she had planned so carefully to avert, had come now, she knew. The delicate structure she had devised had crashed down during her absence, and she saw that Peter and her father were at each other’s throats, or so it appeared to her in the first glance she had of the interior of the room.

She had returned from making the final arrangements for their escape, in happy confidence that Peter would never discover their identity—and here was Peter about to slay her father. She saw an end to everything—the man she looked to for safety was now to destroy them.

She screamed again. It was a scream of utter hopelessness, a scream of black despair.