uding forehead
overhanging steely sharp eyes. These eyes were fixed upon me like those
of an animal from a cave. My observations lasted for but a flash but I
understood that before me was a very dangerous man ready for an instant
spring into irrevocable action. Though the danger was evident, I felt
the deepest offence.

"Sit down," he snapped out in a hissing voice, as he pointed to a chair
and impatiently pulled at his moustache. I felt my anger rising through
my whole body and I said to him without taking the chair:

"You have allowed yourself to offend me, Baron. My name is well enough
known so that you cannot thus indulge yourself in such epithets. You can
do with me as you wish, because force is on your side, but you cannot
compel me to speak with one who gives me offence."

At these words of mine he swung his feet down off the bed and with
evident astonishment began to survey me, holding his breath and pulling
still at his moustache. Retaining my exterior calmness, I began to
glance indifferently around the yurta, and only then I noticed General
Rezukhin. I bowed to him and received his silent acknowledgment. After
that I swung my glance back to the Baron, who sat with bowed head and
closed eyes, from time to time rubbing his brow and mumbling to himself.

Suddenly he stood up and sharply said, looking past and over me:

"Go out! There is no need of more. . . ."

I swung round and saw Captain Veseloffsky with his white, cold face. I
had not heard him enter. He did a formal "about face" and passed out of
the door.

"'Death from the white man' has stood behind me," I thought; "but has it
quite left me?"

The Baron stood thinking for some time and then began to speak in
jumbled, unfinished phrases.

"I ask your pardon. . . . You must understand there are so many
traitors! Honest men have disappeared. I cannot trust anybody. All
names are false and assumed; documents are counterfeited. Eyes and
words deceive. . . . All is demoralized, insulted by Bolshevism. I
just ordered Colonel Philipoff cut down, he who called himself the
representative of the Russian White Organization. In the lining of his
garments were found two secret Bolshevik codes. . . . When my officer
flourished his sword over him, he exclaimed: 'Why do you kill me,
Tavarische?' I cannot trust anybody. . . ."

He was silent and I also held my peace.

"I beg your pardon!" he began anew. "I offended you; but I am not simply
a man, I am a leade