"Well, how goes it to-day?" Freeman asked, as he relieved his lieutenant one morning. "You look a sight better than you did. D'you think you can stand the journey? We don't want you to die on our hands _en route_, you know!"
"We'll start to-day if you like; I'm fit enough," I answered. "Let's get back and get it over. It's a preposterous charge, you know; but--"
"We needn't discuss that, Mr. Wynn," he interrupted hastily.
"All right; we won't. Though I fancy I shouldn't have been alive at this time if you hadn't taken it into your heads to hunt me down as the murderer of a man who wasn't even a naturalized Englishman. You came just in the nick of time, Mr. Freeman."
"Well, yes, I think we did that," he conceded. "You were the most deplorable object I've ever seen in the course of my experience,--and that's fairly long and varied. I'd like to know how you got into their clutches; though you needn't say if it has any connection with--"
"Why, certainly. It's nothing to do with Cassavetti, or Selinski, or whatever his name was," I said.
"I got wind of a Nihilist meeting in the woods, went there out of curiosity; and the soldiers turned up. There was a free fight; they got the best of it, took me prisoner with the others, and that's all. But how did you trace me? How long had you been in Petersburg?"
"Only a couple of days. Found you had disappeared and the Embassies were raising Cain. It seemed likely you'd been murdered, as Carson was. The police declared they were making every effort to trace you, without success; and I doubt if they would have produced you, even in response to the extradition warrant, but that some one mysteriously telephoned information to the American Embassy that you were in prison--in the fortress--and even gave your number; though he would not give his own name or say where he was speaking from."
Who was it, I wondered,--Loris or Mirakoff? It must have been one or the other. He had saved my life, anyhow.
"So acting on that, we simply went and demanded you; and good heavens, what a sight you were! I thought you'd die in the droshky that we brought you here in. I couldn't help telling the officer who handed you over that I couldn't congratulate him on his prison system; and he grinned and said: