"Ah, so!"
It is the sotnik (lieutenant) of a Cossack detachment which has
received the order to drive the last Jews out of the surrounding
villages, so that the army can have a free field. The snow, which has
frozen finger thick on his green overcoat, begins to melt in the close,
hot air of the room. The small, hard Asiatic eyes shine. The red,
frosted fists are still clenched, as if they had just beaten somebody.
"One can't be really angry with these fellows," says the colonel to
himself, with a feeling of soldierly satisfaction.
"They are such splendid beasts."
But he asks aloud:
"Finished?"
The Cossack's laugh is quick and harsh.
"All herded together, Colonel. Nothing is lacking but the Red Sea."
"How many?"
"Several hundred."
"And where are you going to drive them?"
The young lieutenant raises his shoulders slowly, so that the snow on
them touches and cools his red cheeks.
"I'll have to get an order from you as to that!"
"An order!" cries the colonel. "An order! Now, by all three
metropolitans! The devil take me if I know!"
The sotnik raises his shoulder again.
"While they're here they will be in our way."
"The vermin," growls the colonel, "always pestering us like----"
"Like others we are on intimate terms with," laughs the Cossack.
"Look there, if you please!" And half jokingly, half disgustedly, he
points to a black swarm of roaches hurrying like a wagon train from
behind the stove and making for a crack in the floor near the open door.
"They are emigrating, the vermin," exclaims the colonel; "upon my soul,
they are."
"Because they are hungry," says the Cossack, with a grin.
"But the Jews. The Jews, those----" curses the colonel.
"Just as black and just as hungry--but good patriots."
The colonel lifts his head, gazes thoughtfully for a while into the
flickering flame of the slowly melting candle. Then he begins to laugh.
"Why didn't I think of it before? Why didn't I think of it before? Ah,
Little Brother, what asses we have been!"
The Cossack's eyes snap. He, too, has a plan which in all this orgy of
bloodthirstiness appeals to him with an even bloodier zest.
"Do you know what we shall do with them--with all these patriots?"
"Drive them together somewhere and sabre them," suggests the sotnik.
"So that they can fill the newspapers again with their tale of
martyrdom," laughs Gabriel Gabrilovitch, scornfully. "Beware, Little
Brother, beware! We shall leave that to their countrymen this time."
The blank eyes of the Cossack follow the colonel questioningly--like
the eyes of a hunting dog.
"So," laughs the latter, softly stroking his cheek. "We'll drive these
patriots to the Austrian wire entanglements. What do you think? Will
those people over there shoot down their own subjects?"
"But they are non-combatants, Gabriel Gabrilovitch----"
The young man suppressed the thought before he had put it into words.
There was something in the voice of his superior which cowered him.
And, like a hunting dog, he merely listened.
"Don't you see, Little Brother?" continues Gabriel Gabrilovitch,
rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. "And just because in that
case they will not fire, we shall rush in on the enemy. We shall have
cover and can excuse ourselves for using it."
"It would take the devil himself to think of that!" exclaims the
sotnik, full of submissiveness and admiration.
"I am a good Christian," declares Gabriel Gabrilovitch with bitter
humor. "And now I must have an intermediary; for, naturally, I must
inform the enemy so that they will not shoot down so many patriots."
The young Cossack rocked his body as if already in the saddle.
"Won't you permit me to go?"
"Muttonhead! Shall I send one on whose face are the imprints of all
the Devil's ten fingers? Pick out the youngest, the handsomest and
the stupidist of the sotnia and send him over. The kind that believes
anything anybody tells him. Then they over there will believe him. And
what we are going to do nobody but you and I will know. Well, have you
any such 'steed of God?'"
The sotnik strikes his body with both hands, smiles and nods. "There is
a Raskolnik here."
"Is that so, Little Brother?"
Both burst into violent peals of laughter as if overcome by the humor
of the situation.