When they went on she found the three horses a heavy strain upon her arms but the vigour she had to exert to control them kept her warm; and it was a pleasant change from sitting inactive in the back of the sleigh where the cold was bitter even under the pile of fur rugs.
Freddie took over again after the next halt and they went on and on down the long, straight road which they had had no difficulty at all in following as it was still bordered in either side by grim, silent forests.
When they halted for the fifth time they estimated that they must be well over twenty miles from Petsamo; yet they had not seen a single traveller on the road or passed through any village. As they drove on again the snow began to lighten. After a little it ceased altogether and they were able to see the moon, which was only four days past full, and the stars gleaming overhead in a dale, frosty sky. Freddie halted the sleigh once more and remained peering up at them for a moment; then he said in an uneasy voice
"That's the North Star up there on our left. We've been driving into Russia."
"Petsamo is only about fifteen miles from the Russian frontier," said Erika, "so we must have crossed it by now."
"I don't know," Freddie replied. "This road doesn't run due east but about south east by south, so we may still be somewhere on the Finnish side of the frontier."
"Oh, hell!" exclaimed Angela. "What are we going to do? I haven't noticed a single turning for the last ten miles or more and the last thing we want to do is to drive on into enemy territory; yet we can't go back."
Gregory had fallen into a troubled sleep so they could not consult him. Freddie glanced at the dial of his luminous watch. It was not yet midnight and so still November the 30th, the first day of the Russo Finnish War. It seemed incredible that so much should have happened to them in so short a space of time, yet they had woken that morning in the comfortable room at the Helsinki police headquarters with Finland still at peace; reasonably confident that they would soon be free again and, having completed their mission successfully, be on their way to England. Since then, they had been charged with murder, had passed through three devastating air raids, had flown seven hundred miles, had made a most dangerous night landing in a snow storm, had narrowly escaped being killed or captured by drunken Russian soldiers and had driven twenty five miles in a stolen troika to find themselves lost and stranded in the desolate Arctic.
The seemingly endless forests on either side of them were utterly still with a terrifying silence that could almost be felt. For many miles they had seen no sign of life; they were foodless and shelter less and from the agonizing cold they knew that the thermometer must stand at many degrees below zero.
The two men were wanted for murder in Finland; all four of them would be arrested and shot for firing on the soldiers if they fell into the hands of the Russians, and if they did not return to Petsamo they must drive on into Russia, for if they remained where they were they would freeze to death before morning. As all of them silently considered this desperate situation they felt that they were faced with an insoluble problem.
Chapter XXI
The Man without a Memory
"WELL, we can't stay here," said Freddie, flapping his arms across his chest, "otherwise we'll get frost bite. This cold is absolutely shattering and the only antidote to it is to keep moving."
"But where to?" said Angela desperately. "If we go on until we reach a village we'll probably find ourselves in Russia."
"For all practical purposes we're in Russia already," Erika remarked slowly; "as the Russians took Petsamo some time to day they must have driven in the Finnish frontier guards round here; so we're behind the Russian lines now in any case."
"That's true," Freddie agreed, and Erika went on:
"We'll be no worse off if we go forward than if we go back in fact, well almost certainly receive better treatment if we strike a new lot of Russians further along the road than we should if we returned to Petsamo and fell into the hands of the crowd we fired on. They'd never believe we only did it in self defence."
Angela made an effort to stop her teeth chattering and added: "Ye ye es. "They’d sh-shoot us if they caught us, so we must go on. I'm going to drive again."
"Right oh! " Freddie handed her the reins. "There must be a village somewhere along this road and maybe the peasants will give us shelter whether they're Finns or Russians."
They drove on for what seemed an interminable time through the dark, menacing forest, which now looked even more sinister in the bright moonlight, halting occasionally to rest the horses and change the drivers. Erika remained with Gregory's head pillowed on her shoulder although she was cramped and terribly cold. Angela tried to persuade her to change places and take a turn with the reins but she refused for, brave as she was in other ways, she was frightened of anything to do with horses.
Freddie could not understand how any main road, such as this obviously was, could continue for so many miles without a single village upon it, until Erika said: "I don't think people like ourselves who live in the more highly populated parts of Europe ever quite realize how sparsely countries bordering on the Arctic are peopled. Sometimes, I believe, there's as much as a hundred miles between settlements, and then they are inhabited only by miners or trappers."
It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when Angela, who was standing up in the sleigh driving again, gave a cry of exultation and pointed with her whip. A solitary light showed clearly through a break in the trees on the left hand side of the road. halting the sleigh, she and Freddie got out and ran towards a track which wound between the trees. It was only just perceptible in the glow from the snow but they soon realized that the light was much further away than they had at first imagined; so they walked back to the sleigh and climbing in again drove along the track towards it.
The track was about a quarter of a mile in length and as they advanced they saw that the light came from the window of quite a large, one storeyed building. Pulling tip in front of it Freddie gave a shout, but no answer came from the lighted room or from the doorway in the log wall which stood ajar. Tying the reins to a near by post Freddie stamped his feet to try to get some warmth into them, kicked aside a little drift of recently fallen snow outside the door and pushed it open. Catching his breath lie paused there for a moment staring at the ghastly sight that confronted him.
A single oil lamp burned upon a stout, wood table in the centre of the room; its light shone upon four human figures and all of them were unquestionably dead.
Under the window, two panes of which Freddie now saw had been shattered, an elderly bearded man lay clutching a rifle. Near by a younger man sprawled on his back staring with blinded eyes at the raftered roof. On the far side of the room, beyond the table, a middle aged woman was huddled with her arms round a boy of thirteen as though in a last effort to protect him.
Blood stained the white scrubbed floor but the large room was not in serious disorder and it was well equipped for a squatter's home. A row of burnished pots and pans hung beside the stove; the table cloth, curtains and chair coverings were of decent material. In one corner there were some home made shelves, containing at least a couple of hundred books, and a wireless stood on a small side table. Freddie realized at once that such luxuries would never he found in a Russian peasant's shack, so the dead people must be Finns. Perhaps the man and his eldest son had fired upon a body of Soviet troops that they had seen moving along the road earlier in the day. In any case the cottage had been attacked some time after sundown when the lamp had already been lit. It looked as though the two men had been shot whip defending it, and the woman and boy brutally murdered afterwards.