Читать книгу The Secret Dispatch; or, The Adventures of Captain Balgonie онлайн

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"Nay, if he was to perish thus, suspicion might too readily fall upon me, for he is a favourite officer of the Empress, and of Weymarn too. My plan is this: I may get the dispatch to-night in yonder castle of Count Mierowitz."

"And if not?"

"Then I shall again lure and mislead Balgonie, and bring him here in the night."

"What then?" asked the woodman doggedly.

"How dull we are, Paulovitch. We shall drug and drown him; thus shall he die without a wound. I will take back the dispatch to Novgorod; and you can carry the body on his horse to St. Petersburg, where a sum will be given you for finding it. The poor stranger, they will say, has perished amid our keen Russian frosts, and that will be all. Nicholas Paulovitch, the carcass will be well worth twenty roubles to thee."

"And thy fifty?"

"You shall receive when the affair is over, and when you come to me at Novgorod, where I am quartered."

"By the bones of my tribe, and by the sword that flames in the hand of the holy Michail, I am with you, Podatchkine!" exclaimed the half-breed with ferocious joy, mingling his gipsy cant with that of the Russian church. Then they shook heartily their hard and dingy hands—hands that had wrought many a deed of merciless cruelty.