She still held the fragments of the letter in her clenched fist,
"You will, won't you, Papa?"
"No!" shouted the doctor, banging on the table with his hand.
"No!
Rubbish!
In your own interests—no!"
"It'll be hard for you, but you’ll do it, Papa."
"You're a little fool, you chit!" roared the doctor.
"Telegin's a scoundrel, a criminal, he'll be shot by the military tribunal."
Dasha raised her head, and her grey eyes were so unbearably bright, that the doctor grunted, knitting his brows as if to shield his own eyes.
She raised her small fist, the scraps of paper still clutched in it, threateningly.
"If all Bolsheviks are like Telegin," she said, "then the Bolsheviks must be right!"
"Fool!
Fool!"
The doctor, crimson-faced, shaking with rage, jumped up and stamped his foot.
"Your Bolsheviks and your Telegin ought to be hung!
Strung up on the telegraph posts.... They ought to be flayed alive!"
But Dasha's temper was even more violent than her father's. Turning pale, she stepped right up to him, and fixed those unbearably bright eyes on his lace.
"You hound!" she cried. "Stop your raving!
You're no father of mine—madman, sot!"
And she flung the fragments of the letter in his face.
That very night, just before dawn, the doctor was called to the telephone.
A gruff indifferent voice said in his ear:
"For your information: two bodies, identified as those of assistant-chief of counterespionage Govyadin, and one of his agents, have been found near the Samoletskaya landing place behind the flour depot."
The receiver was hung up at the other end.
Dmitri Stepanovich opened his mouth, gasping for air, and fell down beside the telephone in a violent heart attack.
* XI *
Sorokin, having routed the forces of Drozdovsky and Kazanovich, the best troops in the Volunteer Army, changed his original plan for crossing the Kuban River, turning north at Korenovskaya instead, and attacked the station of Tikhoretskaya, where Denikin had his headquarters.
A ruthless battle had been raging there for ten days.
Elated by its first successes, Sorokin's army swept away all obstacles in its path.
It looked as if nothing could now halt its headlong progress.
Denikin hurriedly concentrated his forces, which were scattered all over the Kuban district.
So great was the tension on both sides, that every skirmish ended in a bayonet charge.
But demoralization was developing within the ranks of Sorokin's army with equal rapidity.
The hostility between the Kuban and Ukrainian regiments was becoming daily more acute.
The Ukrainians and the war veterans devastated the Kuban villages in the line of their advance, without troubling to find out which side was supported by the inhabitants.
The utmost confusion of thought prevailed.
The villagers greeted with horror the sight of troops approaching in clouds of dust from across the steppe.
Denikin at least paid for fodder, but Sorokin's fellows made a clean sweep of everything.
And so the young men mounted their horses and went over to Denikin, and the old ones, with the women, children, and cattle, ran for refuge to the gullies.
Whole villages began rising against Sorokin's army.
The Kuban regiments shouted:
"We are being sent to the slaughter, white strangers are pillaging our country!"
Chief of Staff Belyakov struggled desperately in the, whirlwind of events, feeling for his head to make sure that it was still on his shoulders.
And no wonder!
Strategy had been flung to the winds.
Tactics now rested on the points of bayonets and in revolutionary fury.
The vehement, irrepressible, violent mass movement of armed men was being substituted for discipline.
Supreme Commander Sorokin, who lived on spirits and cocaine all through these days, was an appalling sight. His eyes inflamed, his face dark, he forged ahead as if possessed, on the shoulders of the army, shouting himself hoarse.
The inevitable happened.