“He doesn’t look like a common man,” said the interpreter, scanning Pierre.

“Oh, oh, he looks very like an incendiary,” said the officer. “Ask him who he is,” he added.

“Who are you?” asked the interpreter in his Frenchified Russian. “You must answer the officer.”

“I will not say who I am. I am your prisoner. Take me away.” Pierre said suddenly in French.

“Ah! ah!” commented the officer, knitting his brows; “well, march then!”

A crowd had gathered around the Uhlans. Nearest of all to Pierre stood the pock-marked peasant woman with the child. When the patrol was moving, she stepped forward:

“Why, where are they taking you, my good soul?” she said. “The child! what am I to do with the child if it’s not theirs?” she cried.

“What does she want, this woman?” asked the officer.

Pierre was like a drunken man. His excitement was increased at the sight of the little girl he had saved.

“What does she want?” he said. “She is carrying my daughter, whom I have just saved from the flames,” he declared. “Good-bye!” and utterly at a loss to explain to himself the aimless lie he had just blurted out, he strode along with a resolute and solemn step between the Frenchmen.

The patrol of Uhlans was one of those that had been sent out by Durosnel’s orders through various streets of Moscow to put a stop to pillage, and still more to capture the incendiaries, who in the general opinion of the French officers in the higher ranks on that day were causing the fires. Patrolling several streets, the Uhlans arrested five more suspicious characters, a shopkeeper, two divinity students, a peasant, and a house-serf—all Russians—besides several French soldiers engaged in pillage. But of all these suspicious characters Pierre seemed to them the most suspicious of all.

When they had all been brought for the night to a big house on Zubovsky rampart, which had been fixed upon as a guardhouse, Pierre was put apart from the rest under strict guard.