Of these things Peter knew little. He was still in danger, as was Katerin, for there were many in Chita who sought a way to avenge Zorogoff. There were few persons who knew Katerin had killed him, but such knowledge spreads easily in Asia, where there are so many ears listening, so many eyes watching, so many tongues whispering in strange tongues. So Shimilin kept a guard over the hotel, and in it, to see that Peter and Katerin were well protected. And Peter had seen little of Katerin during the week. He had attended the military funeral at daybreak which Shimilin had granted the old general. Katerin was there, hidden and hemmed in among the Cossacks who had served under her father. Few knew who was being buried in the cemetery on the hillside above the ruin of the old prison. So it was that General Kirsakoff became a part of the Valley of Despair which he had ruled. Katerin seemed to avoid Peter after the funeral. She kept to her own rooms, with Wassili, except the night they went with Shimilin and his soldiers to the old log house and retrieved the fortune in rubles which was hidden in the stove. Peter waited till the days had softened her sorrow. He knew she wanted to be alone with her thoughts, as he did with his own. He had no way of knowing how her thoughts would turn in relation to him, but one fact made him happy—Katerin was safe for the time being. He did not know that she possessed a fortune, and he supposed that she would want to remain in Chita. He did not want her to feel any debt toward him for having helped her against the Ataman Zorogoff, and he did not want to presume upon the fact that while she was under the stress of death she had admitted her love for him. There was a barrier between them he well knew—the barrier of the circumstance that Peter would never have been in Chita if he had not sought to kill her father; and behind that, the circumstance that Peter had held her father responsible for the killing of his own father, and his own imprisonment. Peter knew there was nothing which could wipe out those accursed facts, and that they would hover over all thoughts Katerin might have for him. He saw himself fettered by bonds of his own making—and in the gyves of his love for her.