“Come along with me,” replied the Sergeant, and he squared his big shoulders and set off down the street with the quick, light stride that suggested the springing step of his Highland ancestors on the heather hills of Scotland.

Just as they arrived at the house of feasting, a cry, wild, weird and horrible, pierced through the uproar.  The Interpreter stopped as if struck with a bullet.

“My God!” he cried in an undertone, clutching the Sergeant by the arm, “My God!  Dat terrible!”

“What is it?  What is the matter with you, Murchuk?”

“You know not dat cry?  No?” He was all trembling.  “Dat cry I hear long ago in Russland.  Russian man mak dat cry when he kill.  Dat Nihilist cry.”

“Go back and get Dr. Wright.  He will be needed, sure.  You know where he lives, second corner down on Main Street.  Get a move on!  Quick!”

Meantime, while respectable Winnipeg lay snugly asleep under snow-covered roofs and smoking chimneys, while belated revellers and travellers were making their way through white, silent streets and under avenues of snow-laden trees to homes where reigned love and peace and virtue, in the north end and in the foreign colony the festivities in connection with Anka’s wedding were drawing to a close in sordid drunken dance and song and in sanguinary fighting.

In the main room dance and song reeled on in uproarious hilarity.  In the basement below, foul and fetid, men stood packed close, drinking while they could.  It was for the foreigner an hour of rare opportunity.  The beer kegs stood open and there were plenty of tin mugs about.  In the dim light of a smoky lantern, the swaying crowd, here singing in maudlin chorus, there fighting savagely to pay off old scores or to avenge new insults, presented a nauseating spectacle.

In the farthest corner of the room, unmoved by all this din, about a table consisting of a plank laid across two beer kegs, one empty, the other for the convenience of the players half full, sat four men deep in a game of cards.  Rosenblatt with a big Dalmatian sailor as partner, against a little Polak and a dark-bearded man.  This man was apparently very drunk, as was evident by his reckless playing and his jibing, jeering manner.  He was losing money, but with perfect good cheer.  Not so his partner, the Polak.  Every loss made him more savage and quarrelsome.  With great difficulty Rosenblatt was able to keep the game going and preserve peace.  The singing, swaying, yelling, cursing crowd beside them also gave him concern, and over and again he would shout, “Keep quiet, you fools.  The police will be on us, and that will be the end of your beer, for they will put you in prison!”

“Yes,” jeered the black-bearded man, who seemed to be set on making a row, “all fools, Russian fools, Polak fools, Galician fools, Slovak fools, all fools together.”

Angry voices replied from all sides, and the noise rose higher.