Knight Without Armour

It was so restful and satisfying to be on the barge that during their first night aboard they hardly gave thought to the dangers that might still be ahead. Dawn, however, brought a more dispassionate outlook; it was obvious then to both of them that their escape would soon be discovered and that efforts would be made to recapture them. A.J.’s immediate fear was of Samara, which they must reach during the first day’s journey; it seemed to him that the authorities there were likely to be especially vigilant and would probably suspect some method of escape by river. During that first day, as the wooded bluffs passed slowly by on either side, he debated in his mind whether he should take Akhiz somewhat into his confidence. Daly favoured doing so, and A.J. accordingly broached the matter as delicately as he knew how. But delicacy was quite wasted on Akhiz; he had to be told outright that his two passengers were escaping from enemies who wanted to kill them, and that anywhere, especially at Samara and the big towns, he might be questioned by the authorities. They half expected Akhiz to be furious and threaten to turn them ashore, but instead he took it all in with a comprehension so mild and casual that they could only wonder at first if it were comprehension at all. “I don’t think he really understands what we’ve been getting at,” A.J. said, but there he certainly did Akhiz an injustice, for about an hour later the huge fellow, beaming all over his face, drew them to the far end of the barge and showed them a small and inconspicuous gap which he had arranged amongst the piled tree-trunks. “If anyone comes to ask for you, my wife will say nobody here,” he explained, in broken Russian. “You will go in there—see?—and I will put the logs back in their places—so. Plenty of room for you in behind there.” He grinned with immense geniality and bared his arms to show them his bulging muscles. “Nobody move those logs but me,” he declared proudly, and it was satisfactory to be able to believe it.

The presence of such an improvised hiding-place for use in an emergency gave them a feeling of comfort and security, and to A.J.’s further relief the barge did not even put in at Samara, owing to high dock-charges, but went on several miles below the town to a deserted and lonely reach, where no stranger came on board and no suspicious inspection seemed to be taking place from either bank.

They reached Syzran on the fifth day, passing under the great steel railway bridge on which, but a few yards above them, Red sentries were keeping guard, and reaching the end of the long river-loop. The air turned colder, but there was no further snowfall, and during the day-time the sun shone with a fierceness that was quite cheerful, even though it did not lift the temperature much above freezing-point. Already round the edges of the backwaters ice had begun to form. A.J. and Daly used sometimes to choose a sheltered and sunny place among the tree-trunks from which to watch the slowly-changing panorama; it was bitterly cold in the open air, but for a time that was preferable to the fetid atmosphere of the cabin. The river was so wide that they were safe from observation, and the country, especially on the left bank, so lonely that often whole days passed without sound or sight of any human existence on land. Compared with the chaos of which their memories were full, the barge-life seemed a kind and leisurely heaven. A.J.’s normally robust health benefited a great deal from the rest and the cold, keen air; at dusk and dawn he sometimes helped Akhiz with the rafts, and was amused to give proof that his own personal strength was not so very much inferior to that of the Tartar monster.

He would, indeed, have been very happy but for renewal of his anxiety about Daly’s health; the strain of the journey seemed again to be weighing heavily on her. Yet she was very cheerful and full of optimism. They began now to talk as they had hardly dared to do before—of their possible plans after reaching safety. Denikin’s outposts, A.J. believed, could not be much more distant than a few days’ journey from Saratof; it would probably be best to leave the river there and cross that final danger- zone on foot and by night. Then it seemed to occur to them both simultaneously that they would be passing through the town of Saratof, and that somewhere in it lived the ex-butler and the little princess of whom the Valimoffs had so carefully informed them. Should they take the trouble and incur all the possible extra risks that a visit might involve? A.J. decided negatively, yet from that moment they began to feel that the ex-butler and the child were really living people, not merely abstractions talked about by somebody else. They even began to imagine what the girl might be like—dark or fair, pretty or plain, well-bred or spoilt.