made no prisoners. What would have been the good? Our Cossacks either
killed the stragglers or else let them alone, just as it happened. It
came really to the same thing in the end.

"Tomassov turned to me with a very troubled look.

"'He sprang up from the ground somewhere as I was leaving the outpost,'
he said. 'I believe he was making for it, for he walked blindly into my
horse. He got hold of my leg and of course none of our chaps dared touch
him then.'

"'He had a narrow escape,' I said.

"'He didn't appreciate it,' said Tomassov, looking even more troubled
than before. 'He came along holding to my stirrup leather. That's what
made me so late. He told me he was a staff officer; and then talking in
a voice such, I suppose, as the damned alone use, a croaking of rage
and pain, he said he had a favour to beg of me. A supreme favour. Did I
understand him, he asked in a sort of fiendish whisper.

"'Of course I told him that I did. I said: _oui, je vous comprends_.'

"'Then,' said he, 'do it. Now! At once--in the pity of your heart.'

"Tomassov ceased and stared queerly at me above the head of the
prisoner.

"I said, 'What did he mean?'

"'That's what I asked him,' answered Tomassov in a dazed tone, 'and he
said that he wanted me to do him the favour to blow his brains out. As a
fellow soldier he said. 'As a man of feeling--as--as a humane man.'

"The prisoner sat between us like an awful gashed mummy as to the face,
a martial scarecrow, a grotesque horror of rags and dirt, with awful
living eyes, full of vitality, full of unquenchable fire, in a body
of horrible affliction, a skeleton at the feast of glory. And suddenly
those shining unextinguishable eyes of his became fixed upon Tomassov.
He, poor fellow, fascinated, returned the ghastly stare of a suffering
soul in that mere husk of a man. The prisoner croaked at him in French.

"'I recognize, you know. You are her Russian youngster. You were
very grateful. I call on you to pay the debt. Pay it, I say, with one
liberating shot. You are a man of honour. I have not even a broken
sabre. All my being recoils from my own degradation. You know me.'

"Tomassov said nothing.

"'Haven't you got the soul of a warrior?' the Frenchman asked in an
angry whisper, but with something of a mocking intention in it.

"'I don't know,' said poor Tomassov.

"What a look of contempt that scarecrow gave him out of his unquenchable
eyes. He seemed to live only by the force