Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/51

Rh "Very imperfectly—I have studied it."

"What were you doing in Siberia before?"

"Trying to build a telegraph line—but may I be permitted to inquire what is the object of all these questions?"

The gendarme officer, to whom my statements were evidently unsatisfactory, made no reply except to ask, rather peremptorily, for my passport. When informed that our passports were at the hotel he said that we must regard ourselves as under arrest until we could satisfactorily establish our identity and explain our business in Perm. We were then separated, Mr. Frost being put into one dróshky under guard of the gendarme officer, while I took my seat in another beside a gray-bearded official whom I took to be the chief of police. The driver of my dróshky happened to be a highway robber of a hackman who had tried that very morning to make me pay three times the usual rate for five minutes' ride, and when he saw me taken into custody he was unable to conceal his delight.

"They're a bad lot, your high nobility," he said to the chief of police as we drove away in the direction of the town; "only a little while ago they hired my dróshky and then tried to cheat me out of half my fare."

"How much did they give you?" asked the police officer with assumed sympathy.

The driver hesitated.

"Fifty kopéks," I said indignantly, "and it was twice what he ought to have had."

The driver began to asseverate, by all he held sacred, that he had not received half as much as the service was worth; but before he had spoken a dozen words, the chief of police, who evidently knew exactly how far we had ridden in a dróshky that morning, interrupted him with a stern command "Malchí razbóinik! [Shut your mouth, you brigand.] They gave you three times as much as you were entitled to, and still you complain! A stick on the bare back is what you need—twenty blows laid on hot!"