Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/312

290 who stood huddled together in a group by themselves, were mostly in peasant costumes, with bright-colored kerchiefs over their heads, and their faces, I thought, showed great anxiety and apprehension. The men all wore long gray overcoats over coarse linen shirts and trousers; most of them were in chains, and the bare heads of the convicts and the penal colonists had been half shaved longitudinally in such a way that one side of the scalp was smooth and blue while the other side was hidden by long, neglected hair. Soldiers stood here and there around the shed, leaning upon their bayoneted rifles, and inside the little inelosure were the convoy officer of the party, the warden and the surgeon of the Tomsk forwarding prison, the chief of the local bureau of exile administration, and two or three other officers, all in full uniform. Colonel Yágodkin introduced us as American travelers who desired to see the reception of an exile party, and we were invited to stand inside the inclosure.

The officer who was conducting the examination of the convicts drew a folded paper from a large bundle in his hand, opened and glanced at it, and then shouted, "Nikolai Koltsof!" A thin, pale man, with heavy, wearied eyes and a hopeless expression of face, who was standing in the front rank of the exile party, picked up the gray linen bag that lay beside him on the floor, and with a slow clink, clink, clink of chains walked to the inclosure. The examining officer compared his face carefully with a photograph attached to the statéini spísak or "identification paper," in order to make sure that the pale man had not "exchanged names" with some other exile, while a Cossack orderly examined him from head to foot and rummaged through his bag to see that he had neither lost nor surreptitiously sold the articles of clothing that he had received in Moscow or Tiumén, and that his statéini spísak called for.

"Is everything there?" inquired the officer.