They glided on--the excellent cob doing its mediocre best, the four black figures gaining, gaining, gaining--showing more and ever more clearly the lines of horses and armed men. It was a race that could have but one end. Soon the pursuers were but three hundred yards behind; and still they crept closer, closer. Drexel thought these horsemen meant only arrest--which would be disaster enough; he never guessed that death was riding after him, and that in his pocket were papers that would justify his killing. Two hundred yards ... one hundred seventy-five. In five more minutes it would all be over; the countess’s fifty thousand rubles would be earned. She stole a glance at the face of the man she had led to his end in this white waste. In the moonlight it showed clean-cut, strong. “There is no escape?” she whispered--and her voice sounded strange in her ears. His head shook. One hundred fifty yards ... one hundred twenty-five. “Countess,” said Drexel, with intense self-reproach, “I cannot tell you how I blame myself for letting you come!” “Had I not come, I would have been in trouble just the same,” she said. “Perhaps not. But even if so, far better be arrested in Prince Berloff’s house, than by those Cossacks in this desert spot.” The countess, her head turned backwards, saw Drexel’s death, her fortune, gain upon them--and no chance of escape before him. He was as thoroughly trapped in this vast, open country as though he were locked in a narrow dungeon in the granite heart of a prison-fortress. At the moment the Cossacks had come galloping out of the forest that peculiar emotional excitement that had possessed the countess all day had suddenly leaped to a thousandfold its former keenness. As the Cossacks gained, the feeling had grown more intense. She did not try to analyze that feeling; had she, she would have thought it born of the thrill of the death-moment riding so hard behind. As the Cossacks sounded closer, closer, as her well-plotted success drew nearer, nearer, she grew weak, and her strange feeling swirled dizzily within her. And still it had no meaning. One hundred yards. “Stop--or we fire!” boomed across the night in a deep and powerful voice. The moonlight, shining straight into the speaker’s bearded face, corroborated the voice. Drexel saw the leader was Captain Nadson. And he was all but in that man’s hands. For an instant he thought what his capture would mean to Sonya! “Take the lines, countess,” he said sharply. “Now crouch down in the body of the sleigh, so there’ll be less danger of your being hit.” He himself huddled on the floor, his face toward the Cossacks, his Browning pistol drawn.