"Go right ahead," said the voice of Cherry Bim.

He had caught the bridle of the frightened horse, and had drawn him aside. They quickened their steps and came up to the car, which the thoughtful chauffeur had already cranked up at the sound of the shots.

"Where is Kensky?" asked Malcolm suddenly, "did you see him, Cherry?"

A pause.

"Why, no," said Cherry, "I didn't see him after the lamented tragedy."

"We can't leave the old man," said Malcolm.

"Wait," said the little gun-man. "I will go back and look for him."

Five minutes, ten pa.s.sed and still there was no sign or sound of Israel Kensky or of Cherry. Then a shot broke the stillness of the night, and another and another.

"Two rifles and one revolver," said Malinkoff. "Get into the car, Highness. Are you ready, Peter?"

There was another shot and then a fusillade. Then came slow footsteps along the cart track, and the sound of a man's windy breathing.

"Take him, somebody," said Cherry.

Malinkoff lifted the inanimate figure from Cherry's shoulder and carried him into the car. A voice from the darkness shouted a command, there was a flash of fire and the "zip" of a bullet.

"Let her go, Percy," said Cherry, and blazed away with both guns into the darkness.

He leapt for the footboard and made it by a miracle, and only once did they hear him cry as if in pain.

"Are you hit?" asked Malcolm anxiously.

"Naw!" drawled his voice jerkily, for the road hereabouts was full of holes, and even speech was as impossible as even riding. "Naw," he said. "I nearly lost my hat."

He spoke only once again that night, except to refuse the offer to ride inside the car. He preferred the footboard, he said, and explained that as a youth it had been his ambition to be a fireman.

"I wonder," he said suddenly, breaking the silence of nearly an hour.

"What do you wonder?" asked Malinkoff, who sat nearest to the window, where Cherry stood.

"I wonder what happened to that boy on the bicycle?"

CHAPTER XVII

ON THE ROAD

Israel Kensky died at five o'clock in the morning. They had made a rough attempt to dress the wound in his shoulder, but, had they been the most skilful of surgeons with the best appliances which modern surgery had invented at their hands, they could not have saved his life. He died literally in the arms of Irene, and they buried him in a little forest on the edge of a sluggish stream, and Cherry Bim unconsciously delivered the funeral oration.

"This poor old guy was a good fellow," he said. "I ain't got nothing on the Jews as a cla.s.s, except their habit of prosperity, and that just gets the goat of people like me, who hate working for a living. He was straight and white, and that's all you can expect any man to be, or any woman either, with due respect to you, miss. If any of you gents would care to utter a few words of prayer, you'll get a patient hearing from me, because I am naturally a broad-minded man."

It was the girl who knelt by the grave, the tears streaming down her cheeks, but what she said none heard. Cherry Bim, holding his hat crown outward across his breast, produced the kind of face which he thought adequate to the occasion; and, after the party had left the spot, he stayed behind. He rejoined them after a few minutes, and he was putting away his pocket-knife as he ran.

"Sorry to keep you, ladies and gents," he said, "but I am a sentimental man in certain matters. I always have been and always shall be."

"What were you doing?" asked Malcolm, as the car b.u.mped along.

Cherry Bim cleared his throat and seemed embarra.s.sed.

"Well, to tell you the truth," he said. "I made a little cross and stuck it over his head."

"But----" began Malcolm, and the girl's hand closed his mouth.

"Thank you, Mr. Bim," she said. "It was very, very kind of you."

"Nothing wrong, I hope?" asked Cherry in alarm.

"Nothing wrong at all," said the girl gently.

That cross over the grave of the Jew was to give them a day's respite.

Israel Kensky had left behind him in the place where he fell a fur hat bearing his name. From the quant.i.ty of blood which the pursuers found, they knew that he must have been mortally wounded, and it was for a grave by the wayside that the pursuing party searched and found. It was the cross at his head which deceived them and led them to take the ford and try along the main road to the south of the river, on the banks of which Kensky slept his last dreamless sleep.

The danger for the fugitives was evident.

"The most we can hope," said Malinkoff, "is to escape detection for two days, after which we must abandon the car."

"Which way do you suggest?" asked Malcolm.

"Poland or the Ukraine," replied the general quickly. "The law of the Moscow Soviet does not run in Little Russia or in Poland. We may get to Odessa, but obviously we cannot go much farther like this. I have--or had," he corrected himself, "an estate about seventy versts from here, and I think I can still depend upon some of my people--if there are any left alive. The car we must get rid of, but that, I think, will be a simple matter."

They were now crossing a wide plain, which reminded Malcolm irresistibly of the steppes of the Ukraine, and apparently had recalled the same scene to Irene and Malinkoff. There was the same sweep of gra.s.s-land, the same riot of flowers; genista, cornflour and clover dabbled the green, and dwarf oaks and poverty-stricken birches stood in lonely patches.

"Here is a Russia which the plough has never touched," said Malinkoff.

"Does it not seem to you amazing that the Americans and British who go forth to seek new colonies, should lure our simple people to foreign countries, where the mode of living, the atmosphere, is altogether different from this, when here at their doors is a new land undiscovered and unexploited?"

He broke off his homily to look out of the window of the car. He had done that at least a dozen times in the past half-hour.

"We're going fairly fast," said Malcolm. "You do not think anything will overtake us?"

"On the road--no," said Malinkoff, "but I am rather nervous crossing this plain, where there is practically no cover at all, and the car is raising clouds of dust."

"Nervous of what?"

"Aeroplanes," said Malinkoff. "Look, there is a pleasant little wood. I suggest that we get under cover until night falls. The next village is Truboisk, which is a large market centre and is certain to hold local officers of the Moscow Soviet."

Both his apprehensions and his judgment were justified, for scarcely had the car crept into the cover of green boughs, than a big aeroplane was sighted. It was following the road and at hardly a hundred feet above them. It pa.s.sed with a roar. They watched it until it was a speck in the sky.

"They are taking a lot of trouble for a very little thing. Russia must be law-abiding if they turn their aeroplanes loose on a party of fugitive criminals!"