Adventure Magazine Cover — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

4 It was true that I was next in command to our ataman, our colonel who left matters pretty much to me, as he was always riding escort to the Empress. Her majesty liked fine, tall fellows who filled their uni- forms and could sit a horse. She sent for us, out of the steppe fifteen hundred versts away, to see what we were like. We Cos- sacks of the Don are not bad looking chaps, and we can ride better than any one else in the world. Until my father’s time we had always been our own masters, and we came to St. Petersburg to see what the Empress was like. ‘“‘“At command?’ I replied. ‘Well then, listen.”” He looked at me keenly. ‘‘An order has been issued by her Majesty. Some minister or other—I forget his name—sent me out after you at this hour. How would you like, Ivak, to go back to your steppe? To the Black Sea?”’ Now God could have sent nothing to warm my heart more than this. We Don Cossacks were all homesick, really sick. Now and then it had been permitted that we go out after wolves. But what are wolves? A stag is better. Aye, we had no hunting for a whole Winter; all we did was to stand in the wooden boxes they made for their sentries, instead of riding a cordon as a man should. The ensign must have seen how much this pleased me, because he went on less cautiously: “You are detached from service with the squadron, and you alone will go of the Don rufhans. After sunrise report to one of the English officers, Lieutenant Edwards, quartered in the Admiralty street. He is going with you.” ‘‘Am I under his orders?” At this the ensign was silent a moment. Some men never talk openly, and only a fool will share his blanket with that kind. “Nay,” he said after'a while, ‘you are on a mission for the Empress herself. Ac- company Lieutenant Edwards and act with him so far as your orders permit. You are to escort a foreigner to the Black Sea. Arrange for supplies, for post horses and choose a route. You know the country down there, of course, and her Majesty is pleased to remember your services against the Kuban Tatars.” ‘““Good! Who is this foreigner?” I asked. “The Englishman?”’ “What a dolt you are! Don’t you know Adventure a soldier never asks questions! A lashing would teach you Cossacks a thing or two.” He pulled at his clipped mustache and told me that the man who would be in my charge was a high officer. ‘Pardon,’ I said again, “‘but in our service a man is a dolt if he doesn’t get his orders clear in his head. Who is the high officer?”’ The Preobrazhensky manling screwed up his eyes and spat. Well for him he did not spit on my boots! My rank was equal to his,- but then the Muscovites held them- ‘selves above us Cossacks. “You were hatched out of the same egg as Satan! Call him Pavel. That’s enough. And don’t blab about your mission to the tavern wenches, either, Ivak.”’ Evidently he thought, my brothers, that we men of the steppe talked about military affairs to womenfolk, every night, like the Muscovite officers at court. When we talk to the girls our words are otherwise. He leaned over the side of the sleigh to whisper: . ‘Report to the Englishman, Edwards. But come to me—I am the ensign Strelsky of the Guards—for a final word before setting out. Don’t fail!” “T hear.” : Wrapping his furs around him, he shouted an oath at the driver and whirled away. But my ears have listened for quail moving in thickets and wild pigs rooting by the rivers at night. I heard him mutter something that sounded like: ‘‘Pavel—Edwards—Ivak—good riddance all three.” I wondered what final word he was saving for our setting forth—what word he could not speak tome now. And I wondered who Pavel might be, and why the order had come to me direct from the officers of the Empress, who was now monarch of all the Cossacks, instead of through our colonel, in the ordinary way. &) see the ataman again, because my officer was having a fine carouse in the Winter Palace that night, and I said farewell to my brothers of the squadron a little before cock-crow. The essaul who assumed my duties, because he was envious of the order from the Empress and my de- parture for our steppe, said dark things: ‘““As God lives, Ivak, evil will come of AS MATTERS turned out, I did not Go DOOLK C@