But soon Sasha's feet began to ache. He climbed the wooden steps of the shed, that lay in the shadow of a little balcony above. Sasha swore to Polevoi that he did not sit there for more than five minutes. But no one believed him, of course. Sasha must have dozed off on the steps.
As he walked down into the yard again, Sasha heard la faint sound behind him. He turned round — and froze to the spot.
A stranger was climbing over the balcony rail, apparently with the intention of sliding down the post into the yard. How he came to be up -there was a mystery.
Sasha should have fired at once. He should have got the intruder while he was still on the balcony.
But Sasha lost his nerve.
"What do you want?. . . Halt!. . . Halt!. . ." he shouted in a quavering voice.
The stranger immediately darted back through the narrow door leading into the attic. He was still in range of a bullet. Sasha suddenly remembered his rifle. He hugged the butt to his shoulder and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. When he took up his post, Sasha had forgotten to release the safety catch. Hearing Sasha's shout, Petka who was guarding the ammunition cellar thumped on the guard-room door with his rifle, and Nikita standing guard in Kishinev Street blew his whistle.
"There... there... There's a bandit up there!" Sasha burbled at Polevoi as he rushed out into the yard.
In a second the guards had a ladder against the wall. Polevoi was the first to climb on to the roof. Anxious to catch the bandit but wary of being ambushed, Polevoi darted across the roof and climbed in the last attic window.
When he got inside the attic, Polevoi noticed a faint gleam of light far away in the darkness. It was a gap in the wall and a man was struggling to get through it. Polevoi fired twice. The unknown man groaned, but struggled through the gap and crashed over the roof of the next-door house.
Polevoi ordered the two guards who had followed him to chase the stranger over the roofs. He himselfjumped down into the yard, checked my post and sent another three guards to inspect all the yards round headquarters, and the side-road that ran into Kishinev Street. But the bandit managed to slip away before our patrol reached the side-road. After squeezing through the gap on to the roof of the house next door, which was a hostel for chemistry students, the stranger leapt unhesitatingly into a big heap of dung in the hostel garden and slipped out through a hole in the fence into the side-road. Here the trail broke off.
He must have cut across the side-road and made his way through the yards to the Market Square. It was a difficult route, specially for a wounded man; he would have had to climb several fences and get through the barbed wire between the yards, and, after all that, run out on to the well-lighted Market Square. There was a watchman on the square. He sat by the co-operative grocer's wrapped in a sheepskin, with a shot-gun in his hands. Perhaps the watchman had been asleep? Not very likely. At any rate he swore he hadn't slept a wink. Only ten minutes before the incident his wife had brought him a bowl of meat and buckwheat porridge for supper. The meal was still warm when the guards ran up and asked him if he had seen anything. It was hard to imagine how the wounded man could have slipped across the Market Square without the watchman—an old, experienced soldier—noticing him. Nevertheless the trail did lead to Market Square. The barbed wire round the red-brick house on the other side of the street had been pulled apart. On one of its spikes there was a scrap of cloth that must have been torn from the clothing of a man crawling through in a hurry. Apart from the scrap of cloth on the barbed wire there were no other traces of the stranger.
Farther away, on the steps of the large building where the staff of the district education department lived, a drop of dried blood was discovered.
One of the few lucky ones who were allowed to leave the guard-room and take part in the pursuit of the bandit was Furman, once a juvenile delinquent and now a pupil at the factory-training school. At the sight of the blood on the steps Furman was overjoyed. He thought it was the bandit's blood. But the wife of the director of district education who lived in the house said it came from a chicken she had killed the previous Friday. Bitterly disappointed, the unlucky sleuth wandered away.
It could only be supposed that the bandit had got out on to the lighted square, slipped past under the very nose of the sleepy watchman and crossed the bridge into the old part of the town. From there he could make either for the Polish or the Rumanian frontier.
In the attic of the shed at headquarters, the bandit had dropped a bundle of fuse wire and a detonator. Apparently he had intended first to do away with the sentry, then make his way to the ammunition cellar and blow it up, headquarters and all. When he came out on the balcony and saw no one in the yard, he must have concluded that the sentry was asleep. Sasha would have had a bad time if he hadn't come out of his nook and looked round. As it turned out, Sasha had been quite unarmed while he was on guard.
PEELING THE SPUDS
Relieved from his post, Sasha lay down on the couch in the guard-room and pretended to be asleep. No one in the guard-room was sleeping after the excitement of the night. We kept telling each other over and over again what had happened and making all kinds of wild guesses. Furman, a little, thin fellow, insisted that the bandit had dressed himself up as a woman while he was in the garden, and slipped across the Market Square in disguise. Only Sasha took no part in the discussion.
The chaps said that when Nikita ran into the yard he had started to put Sasha through it. Sasha had tried to make excuses, but Nikita had cut him short:
"You're just a funk, that's what you are! Taken unawares, were you? Weren't expecting it, were you?... I suppose if they start dropping bombs on you from an aeroplane, you'll be taken unawares again and start shouting, 'I say, gentlemen, what do you want? Halt! Halt!...' Call yourself a member of the Komsomol."
Nikita's words must have had a very strong effect. Sasha could think of nothing better than to pretend he was ill. He lay on the couch muffled up in his "raglan" coat. Fie was very ashamed of himself for his part in the night's happenings. And who wouldn't have been in his place!... Sasha's "illness" started like this. When he came into the guard-room, he complained that his legs felt weak and he had a terrible headache. Then yellow circles started floating before his eyes...
And now, as he listened to our excited talk, Sasha tried to pretend he was in a fever. He made his teeth chatter, kicked his legs about and moaned pitifully. Actually his moans were more like the whining of a puppy that had been outside on a cold night. Anybody could see he was longing to get properly ill. Sasha would have given a lot at that moment for a dose of scarlet fever, say, or "flu." Instead of laughing at him, everybody would have been sorry and said it was because he had been ill. But Sasha was fit as a fiddle. We knew that, and we knew quite well what was the matter with him.
Nikita came in from the yard. He was carrying a smoky iron pot.
"Well, young people," he began solemnly, "in spite of the serious happenings of last night the demands of Nature must be satisfied. I am not mistaken, I trust, in saying that we are all hungry. To put things in a nutshell, there are spuds behind the stove. We'll peel as many as we can in this pot, then we'll imagine the aroma of sizzling fat, and soon we shall have a modest but satisfying meal. Who's against?"
No one was against Nikita's suggestion. "Who's for?" Nikita asked. Everyone except Sasha raised their hands. "Majority in favour! The debate is over!" Nikita exclaimed cheerfully, and going over to Sasha, he ripped off his overcoat: "Wake up, Sasha, old man, the dicky-birds are singing. Come on, spuds need peeling!" "I can't.. . I feel awful," Sasha moaned. "Sasha, our dearly beloved Comrade Bobir!" Nikita said very tenderly, winking at us. "We all know you are ill, very seriously ill, we all know very well what has caused your illness, nevertheless we all beg you not to act as if the end of the world had come, and wish you a rapid recovery. You mustn't let yourself be captured by that alien spirit Melancholy... Dearly beloved Sasha," Nikita went on, posing like an orator, "we beg you in all sincerity to overcome your sadness and peel the potatoes, for sooner or later you will get hungry yourself, and, as 'tis said, he who does not work, neither shall he eat... As for the real cause of your malady, Sasha, old man, you mustn't be too angry with me for those harsh words that were hurled at you on the threshold of this mansion. Even Homer sometimes nods, you know. We're all young still, we all make mistakes, and everyone except a hardened nitwit learns something from his mistakes, Why be sad and spoil your own valuable nerves with grieving?"