Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/337

Rh were listening very attentively, not to me, however, but to the whispered words of a gaunt, sunburned man with an unusually expressive face. When I asked them rather pointedly if I was not disturbing them, they showed evident signs of being ashamed, and one of them soon came up to me and explained:

"Don't be angry, Starosta; but this new prisoner, the Pike, relates very curious things and, as he will be again transferred to-morrow, we wanted to hear all he has to tell, for it can be of great use to such birds as we. Come and hear what he has to say, Starosta. It is all very curious."

There was nothing for it but that I should close my lecture and ask the Pike to speak loud enough for the whole room to hear, giving us first a short summary of what he had already told the little group in the corner. At that the Pike came to the middle of the room, took the chair and very fluently and picturesquely began his tale.

"We had been living for a long time in Kamchatka in a little village of fishermen and hunters, located on the coast. We busied ourselves catching herring and salmon and hunting seals and whales. We were fairly well off, but not from the returns of our sea industries, for, although these gave us some profits, the work was very difficult, and our boats were inferior to those of the Americans from Alaska and of the Japanese from Hokkaido and Hondo.

"But it came about thus. Once we were working back south along the coast, when the breeze was so light that it hardly filled our sails and we were laboriously pulling along with our oars. Our boats were very heavy with a full catch of herring. All at once my father spied a hayrick on the shore. This astonished him, inasmuch as