Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/244

228 The woman had not arrested our progress nor raised an alarm, after all. Once I had mistrusted her but I now saw that her heart was really filled with pity for the poor girl at my side.

Without a sound we crept forward until within a few yards from that unlocked door where the boat awaited us below, when, of a sudden, the uncertain light of the lantern fell upon something that shone, and a deep voice cried out of the darkness in Russian —

"Halt! or I fire!"

And startled, we found ourselves looking down the muzzle of a loaded carbine.

A huge sentry stood with his back to the secret exit, his dark eyes shining beneath his peaked cap, as he held his weapon to his shoulder within six feet of us.

The big, bearded fellow demanded fiercely who I was.

My heart sank within me. I had acted recklessly, and had fallen into the hands of His Excellency the Baron Xavier Oberg, the unscrupulous Governor-General — fallen into a trap which, it seemed, had been very cleverly prepared for me.

I was a prisoner in the terrible fortress whence no single person save the guards had ever been known to emerge — the Bastille of "The Strangler of Finland!"