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298 As he was being taken away to another prison, he ceremoniously bowed to the ground before all the prisoners and officials, as though he were taking an oath to the earth, and said:

"I shall endure my punishment and then I shall search her out, as I cannot live without her."

Only two persons within the prison walls knew to whom the robber chief referred—Mironoff and I. Mironoff, the Eagle's friend, knew it from the chief himself; and from Mironoff I learned it with many of the other details of the story. Both of us were silent—Mironoff, because he was a prisoner; and I, because I had beheld a burning torture and a love, beautiful in its power and its elemental strength.