IV   THE PLACE OF THE VOW

A NEW conductor boarded the train in the night. He was a big fellow, with a body round as a bear’s and covered with many coats. He wore a big sheepskin cap, and carried a smoking lantern which was made of tin and was square, with a red circular glass in one side, a blue one in the other, and white ones on opposite sides. He held the lantern aloft and studied the sleepers on the shelves, making rainbows in the dim light of the car as he turned his prismatic lantern.

Snicking the ice from his whiskers, he waited till the train moved out again, when he promptly lay down in the passage between the sleeping-shelves and began snoring into the red light of the lantern on the floor beside him.

Lieutenant Peter Gordon, who was on a lower shelf, was awake with the first glimmer of gray light through the frosted windows. And as he looked out upon the floor of the car, he was startled by the sanguinary face of the new conductor in the red glow of the lantern as it rattled with the jolting of the car. Peter studied the queer figure prone on the floor, and observed the booted feet stretched out toward the cold stove in the corner.

Before long the conductor sat up, rubbed his eyes and yawned a chasm of a yawn. He dug into his clothing with a burrowing motion of his arm and brought forth through many strata of coats a watch fit for a giant. He put it to his ear, tilting his great cap to one side, and listened to the ticking. Then he squinted at it in the red light, and having assured himself that the new day had arrived on time, he buried the watch somewhere in Pliocene recesses and hove himself to his feet and attempted to look out of the window.

There was a remnant of candle stuck to the dirty window-sill by its own frozen cataract of tallow. The conductor fumbled for a match, struck it, and lighted the candle. The heat from its flame began to melt a widening oval in the frost. The jumping flame revealed more of the interior of the car—rifles hanging to the walls and rattling against the boarding with every lurch of the train, shoes hung on nails, garments swinging from the upper shelves, bare feet sticking out from blankets, outlandish bundles tied with bits of rope and twisted cloths, cartridge belts toothed with the brass tops of cartridges. And above the complaints of the laboring train could be heard the snores and sleep-mutterings of the Czech soldiers—men of an improvised army which had fought its way across Siberia and was now on the back trail to fight again that their comrades might be saved from annihilation by treacherous enemies.

The conductor studied the frozen wilderness through the window. Having satisfied himself with the landscape, he stared at the cold stove. He took the big ax which braced the door of the car shut and attacked a chunk of wood on the floor with crashing blows. With the splinters split off he started a fire and dumped in slabs of Manchurian coal, which crackled like a line of musketry and threw out into the car ribbons of yellow stifling smoke.

All the sleepers began to cough as the smoke penetrated the car. Soon there was a chattering and a rattling of mess gear, and some one at the other end of the car started the other stove—and a counter smoke-screen against the conductor’s. Another day had begun in the filthy rabbit-hutch of a car. And the gallant Czechs, content to endure their Valley Forge of Siberia, chanted the songs of their homeland.

Peter threw off his blankets and sat up. The conductor smiled at him and reached Peter’s boots up to him from the floor.

“The fire will make it warm soon,” he said, not knowing that Peter was an American officer and not supposed to understand or speak Russian.

“How soon will we get to Chita, my friend?” asked Peter.

“To Chita? Oh, soon.”

“And how soon?”

“Perhaps half an hour. But you are going to Omsk?”

“Only to Irkutsk,” said Peter. He broke the ice in his canvas bucket and washed his face, while the conductor looked on awe-struck at any person who could be so mad as to wash in ice water. He scanned Peter’s tunic, which hung from the shelf.

“Are you Czech?” he asked finally.

“No, I am an American—an officer.”

The conductor opened his mouth wide and crossed himself with both hands.

“But you speak Russian,” he said. “It is not right that you should speak Russian like a Russian and be an American!”

“I am really Russian,” said Peter. “But it is that I have been in America a long time. I came from Petersburg, and now I have come back to help Russia to be free. Do you know Chita well?”

“I? Yes, a little. My wife’s cousin died there in the time of the pestilence. He was a fur-hunter, but he was a stingy. I am not sorry that he died. He ate much when he came to see us, and never had an extra kopeck for the children.”

“Who is the governor of Chita now?”

The conductor gave a snort of disgust. “How could there be a governor in this time of freedom? That is the old way. But we are free men now, as good as anybody. Am I not as good as an officer?”

“Better,” said Peter. “But there was a governor in the old days. Every place had a governor for the Czar. You know that as well as I, my friend.”

“True, I know it. But what does it matter now? This is not the old time.”

“There was a prison in Chita—or was there?”

“True, there was a prison. A big one on a hill. You shall see it in time as we come to the city. But it is empty now, and the devil may live in it for all I care.”

“I have heard that there was a Colonel Governor in Chita with one eye. He lost the other in a fight with a tiger, but he killed the tiger.”

“Poosh!” said the conductor. “That is somebody’s vodka-story. I have been on the railroad from the time it began, and I never heard of any Colonel Governor who killed a tiger, or who had one eye. The last governor at Chita was named Kolessow, and he had a bad leg, not a bad eye. He ran away when the revolution came. Before that was Kirsakoff, and I can tell you Kirsakoff had both his eyes. I never saw him—and a good thing, too, or——”

“There never was a governor here named Kirsakoff,” said Peter.

“No!” cried the conductor. “You have been in foreign lands, but you know more than I about this, do you? I say that there was a governor—Michael Alexandrovitch, and a general!”

“Perhaps I am wrong after all. Forgive me. But I had forgotten, because Kirsakoff went to Odessa.”

“Perhaps he did. I don’t know,” said the conductor. “Are you looking for him?”

“Oh, no,” said Peter. “I am looking for my brother. All I know is that my brother was in a place where a Colonel Governor with one eye lived—the fellow who had a fight with a tiger. But it was not Kirsakoff, surely.”

“No,” said the conductor. “It could not be he. So you have lost your brother? It is always the same story. Since we got freedom everybody is lost. I have not had my pay for six months, and I have seven children living and my wife is sick. My children cannot eat freedom, but it is the capitalists who are keeping us poor. In the old days I had a cow. And now the Americans have come. It is said that they want to steal our railroad and take our work away from us.”

“That is a lie,” said Peter. “The Americans are your friends.”

“What kind of friend comes to steal your work? I don’t know anything about politics, but my children have nothing to eat but cabbage. I know that, and they know it. I think it was better with the Czar. These fellows who come and talk politics—they are smart men—and good men. They gave us a lot of rubles. But with freedom it costs a hundred rubles for a loaf of bread, and I get no pay. And those fellows who talked politics ate my cow, and nobody wants the rubles they gave me. What kind of business is that? Not to take rubles after my cow has been eaten!”

Peter shook his head, helpless for an answer, and finished his dressing. He went out on the platform between cars. The cold air assailed him witheringly, for it was more than sixty degrees below zero that morning. He pulled the fur strap of his cap across his nose and leaned out from the car steps to scan the snow-streaked plain.

In the distance were low hills covered with sparse fringes of pines and larches. At the base of the hills, huddled against them like a flock of sheep seeking shelter, were primitive huts of the aboriginal Buriats, and stray Mongol herdsmen in winter quarters.

The train made a detour on temporary trackage to get round the wreck of a bridge that had been blown up. The little river was frozen and peasants were cutting a hole in the ice to get water for a pair of scraggly little Siberian ponies with coats of long frost-covered hair and icicles hanging from their nostrils. The men stopped to watch the train go past, and flailed their bodies with their arms to keep warmth in their blood.

Once more the slowly moving train changed direction and drew near to low hills ahead, their crests serrated by timber and their sides slashed with snow which was held in the frozen water courses. As it rounded these hills and ran in through a low pass, a city of bizarre appearance was unmasked. It lay in a great cup between hills—in a wide valley, level as a plain.

At first sight the city looked more like the smoldering ruin of a vast settlement that had recently been destroyed by fire. Rising from a sea of small huts was what appeared to be a forest of gigantic white fungi—columns of ivory smoking from the tops, or some poisonous growths like giant toadstools, or a land filled with tiny craters from which rose gray fumes that spread high in air into motionless clouds. These queer pillars were nothing but smoke rising from the buildings of the city and the warm air from chimneys rising straight up in the still, frigid air.

Through the pillars of steam and smoke could be seen taller buildings, and here and there minaretlike spires lifted out of the ruck, and catching the morning sun, reflected the light with tints of gold and bluish green. And there were great blue domes marking the synagogue, while a cross and a crescent glinted with gilt from the top of a Moslem mosque. The old exile settlement of Chita—the Valley of Despair—had grown to a city and filled the plain.

On the slopes of the hill above, Peter saw a great yellowish stockade built of upright logs which enclosed low, rambling buildings. The sun flashed from tiny windows which were smaller than the gun ports of a frigate, or where the tiny windows were broken there were black holes like eye sockets in a skull. Many stubby chimneys built of stone gave the low buildings the appearance of castellated walls. But no smoke issued from the chimneys.

In contrast with the smoking city below, the place of the stockade seemed to be deserted. The scant snow all about it was unbroken by any path, showing that if there was a road leading to the stockade, it was not in use. The yellow color of the walls suggested an unhealthiness—a place shut away from the population of the city. The lines of the place were clearly etched upon the slope like the skeleton of some monstrous animal which had died upon the dreary and deserted hillside. And it was a dead thing—the wreck of the old prison of the Valley of Despair.

The train puffed into the station. The platform was thronged with a surging mob of people making a mad clamor to get into the cars filled with soldiers. They pleaded to be allowed to ride to any place, but there was no room for them in the stifling train and the Czechs refused to allow the refugees aboard. So they gathered up their pitiful belongings and swarmed back into the station out of the cold to wait for other trains which might take them away.

Peter gathered up his blanket-roll and his bag and slipped out of the car. He got a porter at the station, a big moujik in a dirty white apron, to take the things to a droshky in the square.

Once free of the mob, and with the station between him and the train, Peter looked across the square. Some soldiers were drilling in the open place—short chaps, of heavy build and awkward movements, learning to march and countermarch under the commands of Cossack officers.

There were many brick buildings of three and four stories. But between them were the low, squat log houses of old times, battered and unkempt, run-down pioneers now relegated to the position of poor relations and long neglected.

Peasant women trotted round and round their crude carts, selling blocks of frozen soup and loaves of black bread to refugees from the station. The cold air was laden with sour odors. There was a great gabbling between buyers and sellers. The women and men kept running round in circles for warmth, their breath bearding them with steam from their nostrils. To the half-clad and hungry, merely keeping alive in such cold was an agony.

A group of boys with tattered newspapers gathered about Peter, noting his furs and his brown field-boots with curious eyes. These boys were wrapped with long woolen scarfs, and wore uncouth clothes and men’s boots long since thrown away by the original owners—boots lacking soles except for rags bound round the feet. If the lads stood still for but a minute, it was to shiver violently, so they kept jumping up and down like marionettes moved by a string. Peter’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of them, and he threw them a handful of paper rubles and kopecks that they might have hot cabbage soup.

“Poor little chaps!” he said, and, getting into a droshky, told the iswostchik to drive to the best hotel. The horses broke into a gallop at once, straight across the square, and it was then that Peter noticed an ancient building in the line of the street ahead. It was built of logs in the old style.

“Is that the old post-house?” he shouted to the driver.

“Yes, that is it,” said the driver.

“Then stop! In front of the post-house!” cried Peter, slapping the driver on the back with a lusty thump. “Turn, please—and stop!”

“But it is a restaurant now,” said the driver. He seemed bewildered, but he swung his horses into the street before the old building and brought them up abruptly, muttering in his whiskers.

“You said to go to a hotel, and this is a restaurant,” he complained. “How am I to know what you want, when you say two different things to me about where you want to go?”

“I wish to stop here but a minute,” said Peter. He jumped out of the droshky, and, standing in the street, looked up and down its length, and turned to survey the old post-house. Sure enough, the sign over it said it was a restaurant, and through the tops of the partly clear windows he could see the gaudy colors of curtains hanging within.

“The Sofistkaya!” whispered Peter. “I would never have known it.” He studied the square, the big white station, and the buildings of the street. He walked through the loose sand to a spot directly in front of the door of the old post-house, but well out from it, and crossed himself twice with both hands in the old way.

He looked down at the sand and dirty snow.

“Blood of my father!” he whispered. “I have come back to keep the vow! I pray that I am not too late—that Kirsakoff still lives!”

He stood there a few minutes, the tears streaming down his cheeks and freezing on the flesh. He uttered prayers, and then strode back to the droshky, entered it, and was once more rolling up the Sofistkaya.