Page:Ossendowski - Beasts, Men and Gods.djvu/30

14 him had been murdered. &hellip;" Ivan was still for a moment and then continued:

"This is their old hut. Here he lived with his wife and somewhere on this river he took out his gold. But he told nobody where. All the peasants around here know that he had a lot of money in the bank and that he had been selling gold to the Government. Here they were murdered."

Ivan stepped to the stove, took out a flaming stick and, bending over, lighted a spot on the floor.

"Do you see these spots on the floor and on the wall? It is their blood, the blood of Gavronsky. They died but they did not disclose the whereabouts of the gold. It was taken out of a deep hole which they had drifted into the bank of the river and was hidden in the cellar under the shed. But Gavronsky gave nothing away. &hellip; And Lord how I tortured them! I burned them with fire; I bent back their fingers; I gouged out their eyes; but Gavronsky died in silence."

He thought for a moment, then quickly said to me:

"I have heard all this from the peasants." He threw the log into the stove and flopped down on the bench. "It's time to sleep," he snapped out, and was still.

I listened for a long time to his breathing and his whispering to himself, as he turned from one side to the other and smoked his pipe.

In the morning we left this scene of so much suffering and crime and on the seventh day of our journey we came to the dense cedar wood growing on the foothills of a long chain of mountains.

"From here," Ivan explained to me, "it is eighty versts to the next peasant settlement. The people come to these