“Three of the crew took too much vodka in St. Petersburg yesterday.”

The Prince nodded carelessly, as if he believed, and offered his open cigarette case to the Captain, who shook his head.

“I smoke a pipe,” he growled.

The Captain rose with his lighted pipe, and together they went up on deck again.  The Prince saw nothing more of the tall sentinel who had been his guard the night before, so without asking permission he took it for granted that his movements, now they were in the open sea, were unrestricted, therefore he walked up and down the deck smoking cigarettes.  At the stroke of a bell the Captain mounted the bridge and the mate came down.

Suddenly out of the thickness ahead loomed up a great black British freighter making for St. Petersburg, as the Prince supposed.  The two steamers, big and little, were so close that each was compelled to sheer off a bit; then the Captain turned on the bridge and seemed for a moment uncertain what to do with his prisoner.  A number of men were leaning over the bulwarks of the British ship, and it would have been quite possible for the person on one boat to give a message to those on the other.  The Prince, understanding the Captain’s quandary, looked up at him and smiled, but made no attempt to take advantage of his predicament.  Some one on board the English ship shouted and fluttered a handkerchief, whereupon the Prince waved his cigarette in the air, and the big boat disappeared in the thickness of the east.

Lermontoff walked the deck, thinking very seriously about his situation, and wondering where they intended to take him.  If he were to be put in prison, it must be in some place of detention on the coast of Finland, which seemed strange, because he understood that the fortresses there were already filled with dissatisfied inhabitants of that disaffected land.  His first impression had been that banishment was intended, and he had expected to be landed at some Swedish or German port, but a chance remark made by the Captain at breakfast inclined him to believe that there were other prisoners on board not quite so favorably treated as himself.  But why should he be sent out of Russia proper, or even removed from St. Petersburg, which, he was well aware, suffered from no lack of gaols.  The continued voyage of the steamer through an open sea again aroused the hope that Stockholm was the objective point.  If they landed him there it merely meant a little temporary inconvenience, and, once ashore, he hoped to concoct a telegram so apparently innocent that it would win through to his friend, and give Drummond at least the knowledge of his abiding-place.  The thought of Drummond aroused all his old fear that the Englishman was to be the real victim, and this enforced voyage was merely a convenient method of getting himself out of the way.