r thinking of the things that you seem to have
forgotten entirely."

He indicated the general's wounded leg.

"The chances of war! the chances of war!" said the general. "A leg here,
an arm there. But, as you see, I am still here. They will end by growing
tired and leaving me in peace. Your health, my friend!"

"Your health, general!"

"You understand," continued Feodor Feodorovitch, "there is no occasion
to excite ourselves. It is our business to defend the empire at the
peril of our lives. We find that quite natural, and there is no occasion
to think of it. I have had terrors enough in other directions, not to
speak of the terrors of love, that are more ferocious than you can
yet imagine. Look at what they did to my poor friend the Chief of the
Surete, Boichlikoff. He was commendable certainly. There was a brave
man. Of an evening, when his work was over, he always left the bureau of
the prefecture and went to join his wife and children in their apartment
in the ruelle des Loups. Not a soldier! No guard! The others had every
chance. One evening a score of revolutionaries, after having driven away
the terrorized servants, mounted to his apartments. He was dining with
his family. They knocked and he opened the door. He saw who they were,
and tried to speak. They gave him no time. Before his wife and children,
mad with terror and on their knees before the revolutionaries, they read
him his death-sentence. A fine end that to a dinner!"

As he listened Rouletabille paled and he kept his eyes on the door as
if he expected to see it open of itself, giving access to ferocious
Nihilists of whom one, with a paper in his hand, would read the sentence
of death to Feodor Feodorovitch. Rouletabille's stomach was not yet
seasoned to such stories. He almost regretted, momentarily, having
taken the terrible responsibility of dismissing the police. After what
Koupriane had confided to him of things that had happened in this house,
he had not hesitated to risk everything on that audacious decision, but
all the same, all the same--these stories of Nihilists who appear at the
end of a meal, death-sentence in hand, they haunted him, they upset him.
Certainly it had been a piece of foolhardiness to dismiss the police!

"Well," he asked, conquering his misgivings and resuming, as always, his
confidence in himself, "then, what did they do then, after reading the
sentence?"

"The Chief of the Surete knew he had no time to spare. He did