hear
nothing in the great walled-in railway yard except the clack of feet
on gravel, and sometimes on the network of steel tracks that shone
silvery as the hard snow under the round moon.

My comrade ran like a man who knows exactly where he means to go.
Indeed, he had already determined to follow a plan that had long
before occurred to him. It was a vision of what one or two desperate
men with bombs might do at close quarters against a number with
pistols.

As Verbitzsky approached the south end of the yard, which is excavated
deeply and walled in from the surrounding streets, he turned, to my
amazement, away from the line that led into the suburbs, and ran along
four tracks that led under a street bridge.

This bridge was fully thirty feet overhead, and flanked by wings of
masonry. The four tracks led into a small yard, almost surrounded by
high stone warehouses; a yard devoted solely to turn-tables for
locomotives. There was no exit from it except under the bridge that we
passed beneath.

"Good!" we heard Nolenki cry, fifty yards behind. "We have them now in
a trap!"

At that, Verbitzsky, still in the moonlight, slackened speed,
half-turned as if in hesitation, then ran on more slowly, with zigzag
steps, as if desperately looking for a way out. But he said to me in a
low, panting voice:--

"We shall escape. Do exactly as I do."

When the police were not fifty feet behind us, Verbitzsky jumped down
about seven feet into a wide pit. I jumped to his side. We were now
standing in the walled-in excavation for a new locomotive turn-table.
This pit was still free from its machinery and platform.

"We are done now!" I said, staring around as Verbitzsky stopped in the
middle of the circular pit, which was some forty feet wide.

Just as the police came crowding to the edge, Verbitzsky fell on his
knees as if in surrender. In their eagerness to lay first hands, on
him, all the police jumped down except the chief, Dmitry Nolenki. Some
fell. As those who kept their feet rushed toward us, Verbitzsky sprang
up and ran to the opposite wall, with me at his heels.

Three seconds later the foremost police were within fifteen feet of
us. Then Verbitzsky raised his terrible bombs.

From high above the roofs of the warehouses the full moon so clearly
illuminated the yard that we could see every button on our
assailants' coats, and even the puffs of fat Nolenki's breath. He
stood panting on the opposite wall of the excavati