"I beg your pardon."
Our host and his visitors exchanged significant glances. My hand stole quickly to the pocket of my coat where I was carrying my Browning, but Vlasienko assumed the role of quieting our adversaries. He bent down and raised a heavy wooden bench, doing it with such grace and giving such an impression of ease that the savagelooking quartette dropped their eyes and subsided.
"Well, then, I give you three days in which to make up your minds," I repeated, and, together with Vlasienko, left the den of this agent of the Tsar's Government, where under the stimulus of vodka, criminal plans, full of blood and treachery, were elaborated. On the following day I learned that the Workers' Committee—or, as it was called "The Little Committee"—were electing a new chairman, inasmuch as Ivanoff had disappeared. It was evident that, for the moment, my words and the arguments of Vlasienko had frightened him.
However, the newly chosen chairman did not succeed in calming or did not try to calm the mass of labourers, for many times during the succeeding days I was shown proclamations issued by the Little Committee, in which the soldiers and sailors were urged and incited "to murder all the officers, to divide all their equipment and to attack the towns where the hated intelligentsia and bourgeoisie lived."
Telegrams brought word that such proclamations as these made a very distinct impression upon the workers in many of the Siberian centres, especially Vladivostok, Habarovsk, Nikolaievsk on the Amur and Blagoveschensk, where the workers began developing riotous tendencies and breaking away from the control of our Central Committee. In Nikolaievsk wild gangs of the scum of mankind, composed very largely of fugitives
