II.—­The Rebel Chief

One evening early in October, 1773, Captain Mironoff called Chvabrine and me to his house.  He had received a letter from the general at Orenburg with information that a fugitive Cossack named Pugatchef had taken the name of the late Czar, Peter III., and, with an army of robbers, was rousing the country, destroying forts and committing murder and theft.  The news spread quickly, and then came a disquieting report that a neighbouring fort some sixteen miles away had been taken by Pugatchef, and its officers hanged.

Neither Mironoff nor Vassilissa showed any fear, and the latter declined to leave Belogorsk, though willing that Marya should be sent to Orenburg for safety.  An insolent proclamation from Pugatchef, inviting us to surrender on peril of death, and the treachery of our Cossacks and of Chvabrine, who went over at once to the rebels, only made the commandant and his wife more resolute.

“The scoundrel!” cried Vassilissa.  “He has the impudence to invite us to lay our flag at his feet, and he doesn’t know we have been forty years in the service!”

It was the same when Pugatchef was actually at our door, and the assault had actually begun.  Old Ivan Mironoff blessed his daughter, and embraced his wife, and then faced death.  There was no fight in the poor old pensioners who made up our garrison, and both Mironoff and myself were soon captured, bound with ropes, and led before Pugatchef.

The commandant indignantly refused to swear fidelity to the robber chief, and was hanged there and then in the market square; an old one-eyed lieutenant was soon swinging by his side.  Then came my turn, and I gave the same answer as my captain had done.  The rope was round my neck, when Pugatchef shouted out “Stop!” and ordered my release.  A few minutes later, and poor old Vassilissa, who had come in search of her husband, was lying dead in the market square, cut down by a Cossack’s sword.  Pugatchef’s arrival had prevented Marya’s escape to Orenburg, and she was now lying too ill to be moved, in the house of Father Garassim, the parish priest.

Pugatchef gave me leave to depart in safety, but before Saveluetch and I left the fort, the rebel bade me come and see him.  He laughed aloud when I presented myself.

“Who would have thought,” he said, “that the man who guided you to a lodging on that night of the snowstorm was the great tzar himself?  But you shall see better things; I will load you with favours when I have recovered my empire.”

Then he invited me again and again to enter his service, but I told him I had sworn fidelity to the crown; and finally he let me go, saying:  “Either entirely punish or entirely pardon.  Tell the officers at Orenburg they may expect me in a week.”

It hurt me to leave Marya behind, especially as Pugatchef had made Chvabrine commandant of the fort, but there was no help for it.  Father Garassim and his wife bade me good-bye.  “Except you, poor Marya has no longer any protector or comforter,” said the priest’s wife.