Yes, I must for the future "choose the page's part," and, if she should ever have need of me, I would serve her, and take that for my reward!
I fell asleep on that thought, and only woke--feeling fairly fit, despite the dull ache in my head and the throbbing of the flesh wound in my shoulder--when we reached Dunaburg, and the cars were shunted to a siding.
Mishka turned up again, and insisted on valeting me after a fashion, though I told him I could manage perfectly well by myself. I had come out of the affair better than most of the passengers, for my baggage had been in the rear part of the train, and by the time I got to the hotel, close to the station, was already deposited in the rooms that, I found, had been secured for me in advance.
I had just finished the light meal which was all Dr. Nabokof would allow me, when Mishka announced "Count Solovieff," and the Grand Duke Loris entered.
"Please don't rise, Mr. Wynn," he said in English. "I have come to thank you for your timely aid. You are better? That is good. You got a nasty knock on the head just at the end of the fun, which was much too bad! It was a jolly good fight, wasn't it?"
He laughed like a schoolboy at the recollection; his blue eyes shining with sheer glee, devoid of any trace of the ferocity that usually marks a Russian's mirth.
"That's so," I conceded. "And fairly long odds; two unarmed men against a crowd with knives and bludgeons. Why don't you carry a revolver, sir?"
"Because I guess it would have been confiscated at the frontier. I'm a civilian, and--I've been in Russia before! But if you'd had a six-shooter--"
"There would have been no fight; they would have run the sooner,--all the better for some of them," he answered, and as he spoke the mirth passed from his face, leaving it stern and sad. "I ought to have had a revolver, of course, but I was pitched out of bed without any warning, as I presume you were. By the way, Mr. Wynn, in the official report no mention is made of our--how do you call it?"
"Ah, that is the word. Our scrimmage. Your name is in the list of those wounded by the explosion of the bomb. It was a bomb, as perhaps you have learned. Believe me, as you are going to Petersburg, and expect to remain there for some time, you will be the safer if no one--beyond myself and the few others on the spot, most of whom can be trusted--knows that you saved my life. Ah, yes, indeed you did that!" he added quickly, as I made a dissentient gesture. "I could not have kept them off another minute. Besides, you saw them first, and warned me; otherwise we should both have been done for at once."