Michael Strogoff, remembering that, above all, prudence was requisite, instinctively drew back. "It is not necessary," he replied, and calmly stepped back ten paces.
The man seemed, as Michael observed him well, to have the look of a Bohemian, such as are met at fairs, and with whom contact, either physical or moral, is unpleasant. Then, as he looked more attentively through the dusk, he perceived, near the cottage, a large caravan, the usual traveling dwelling of the Zingaris of gypsies, who swarm in Russia wherever a few copecks can be obtained.
As the gypsy took two or three steps forward, and was about to interrogate Michael Strogoff more closely, the door of the cottage opened. He could just see a woman, who spoke quickly in a language which Michael Strogoff knew to be a mixture of Mongol and Siberian.
"Another spy! Let him alone, and come to supper. The papluka is waiting for you."
Michael Strogoff could not help smiling at the epithet bestowed on him, dreading spies as he did above all else.
In the same dialect, although his accent was very different, the Bohemian replied in words which signify, "You are right, Sangarre! Besides, we start to-morrow."
"To-morrow?" repeated the woman in surprise.
"Yes, Sangarre," replied the Bohemian; " to-morrow, and the Father himself sends us—where we are going!"
Thereupon the man and woman entered the cottage, and carefully closed the door.
"Good!" said Michael Strogoff, to himself; "if these gipsies do not wish to be understood when they speak before me, they had better use some other language."
From his Siberian origin, and because he had passed his childhood in the Steppes, Michael Strogoff, it has been said, understood almost all the languages in usage from Tartary to the Sea of Ice. As to the exact signification of the words he had heard, he did not trouble his head. For why should it interest him?
It was already late when he thought of returning to his inn to take some repose. He followed, as he did so, the course of the Volga, whose waters were almost hidden under the countless number of boats floating on its bosom.
An hour after, Michael Strogoff was sleeping soundly on one of those Russian beds which always seem so hard
