Some one had heard! Swift as the bird flies the words travelled. Nicholas, the man who had spoken, disappeared from among his fellows who worked in a nobleman’s field, while the man who had merely answered soon felt the dreaded spy shadow hovering over him, following him and blighting the way before.
In Ivan’s hut there were five: Maria the wife, Zetta the eldest girl, ’Tiana (short for Tatiana) who crept about, and Paul the baby, and over them all the spy shadow hung. Some day, Ivan had hoped they might all go overseas to America, where it was said that one might not only laugh, but own land and houses; perhaps this might happen when Paul also could walk. But all that was before the spy shadow fell. A little money had been saved and hidden beneath the thatch, but the shadow seemed to shut a door between Ivan and freedom of motion even. What day it would come in the door, he could not tell. Some work horses from the estate were to go for exhibition to a neighbouring fair. When they were ready, polished and sleek, with bunches of ribbons braided in their manes and tails, the man in charge of them fell suddenly ill, and not daring to disarrange his overseer’s plans, he begged Ivan to wear his new boots, blouse, and cap, and ride the horses to the fair. Maria urged him to go, and overlooked the new blouse carefully,—a stitch was lacking here and there, she said,—and had he the eyes for it there was something strange both in her face and her manner of wishing him good-by.
The first night of the fair, amid some little jollity and confusion, an overseer in a village near to Ivan’s pressed close to him and whispered in his ear, “Michael is in Siberia, I, too, am beneath the spy cloud and therefore I go away to-night; come you with me, else it will be too late, to-morrow they mean to arrest us both; keep on moving with the crowd and do not let your face change.”
“How? I cannot, I have no money, and there is Maria and all. You need not think I will do that.”
“Maria knows and wishes it, then she follows when you have made a place. She has sewn the money from the thatch into the blouse you wear.”
Involuntarily Ivan pressed his hand to his side where something had been chafing him, and there he felt the little box that held their treasure. Without question Maria had placed it there, Maria must know more than he. So Ivan Gronski turned his back upon Russia, hatred of his country being all that remained of it in his heart, for what other heritage is left to an honest Russian Pole!