Then Prince Gutemurov revealed what he had seen the previous night, on his way home. Yasha was overwhelmed. He fell on his knees and begged my forgiveness, cursing Dmitri and promising to make short work of him. But Yasha could not find him. Dmitri learned of the disclosure and disappeared forever from Amga. Soon afterwards, another incident occurred which further embittered my life with Yasha. In his absence Vasili, a political, came and told me that the authorities were in receipt of an order to arrest and send him to Irkutsk to be tried on a new charge, which carried with it the death-sentence. It was a regular practice of the Tsar’s government to recall exiles for second trials on some additional bit of evidence. Vasili asked me to lend him our horse, “Maltchik,” to help him escape. Knowing how attached Yasha was to the horse, I refused Vasili’s request. But he persisted in imploring me, claiming that Prince Gutemurov had seen the order for the arrest, and that the sheriff was already on his tracks. “But how could the horse be returned?” I asked Vasili, touched by his continuous pleading. He replied that he would leave it with a certain Yakut friend of ours, some hundred versts away, and I finally yielded, although not without misgivings. As soon as he left with “Maltchik” my anxiety grew into alarm. I hurried to Prince Gutemurov to verify Vasili’s story. How thunder-struck I was upon learning from the Prince that he knew of no order to arrest Vasili, and that he had not even seen him. It was clear that I had been swindled and that I would never see the horse again. “My God!” I thought, “what will happen upon Yasha’s return and his discovery that “Maltchik” is gone?” The fear of death rose up before me, the impression of my recent escape from hanging still fresh in my mind. I trembled at the thought of Yasha, with the feeling of an entrapped animal seeking an escape. But there seemed to be no remedy. It was August, 1914. Rumours of the great conflict were just reaching the remote Siberian provinces. The order for mobilization came, and there was great excitement, even in the death-bound Arctic settlements, as if suddenly a new life had been infused into that land of monotony. Upon the heels of the call to arms came the Tsar’s Manifesto, abolishing the scourge of our national life--vodka, and with it a gigantic wave of popular enthusiasm, sweeping the steppes, valleys, and forests of vast Russia, from Petrograd and Moscow, across the Ural mountains and Siberia, to the borders of China, and the Pacific coast. There was something sublime about the nation’s response. Old men, who had fought in the Crimean War, in the Turkish Campaign of 1877-78, and The Russo-Japanese War, declared that they never saw such exaltation of spirit. It was a glorious, inspiring, unforgettable moment in one’s life. My soul was deeply stirred, and I had a dim realization of a new world coming to life, a purer, a happier and a holier world.