Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/336

324 When my companions ran back to me in answer to my shout for help, we investigated the sledge and found that a rope was cut and one bale of silk gone. As we had passed through a large village only an hour earlier, we felt fairly certain that its peasants had made an ambush for us and consequently decided to punish them. With our force of nearly two hundred strong and well-trained men, we carried out our intentions in a way that the village must have long remembered.

"When the police arrested us and our trial was on, we learned that eleven of the peasants had been killed during our raid and among them one Gregory Suvoroff. I asked to be shown the body of this man and recognized my own brother. On that day I made up my mind to spend a large part of my remaining life in prison as a penance to win God's pardon for my crime. Though the tribunal condemned us to only a year's confinement, in view of the fact that we were under the necessity of protecting our caravans from these frequent robberies, I have succeeded, by repeated escapes and open rebellion against the authorities, in having my term extended to twelve years and have still another three left to round out the period of fifteen which I decided should be the length of my punishment. To-day is the anniversary of my brother's death, and perhaps—who knows?—it was my own hand that killed him."

Once more the prison turned before me a page of its martyrs' book and enabled me to look into the depths of another human soul, which is man's own most severe judge. How many such pages from the terrible book of human misery, almost unknown to any save those who had made the record, I could read in the prison!

Once in the evening, during a lecture to the convicts, I remarked that a group of them sitting in one corner