Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/380

364 player that after his death was brought back from Alaska amid the mourning of a nation." A cold chill ran down my spine. It suddenly flashed upon me that this must be an elementary fact that even school-children were expected to know — and I was so ignorant that I had never even heard of an Alaskan euchre-player. In order to gain a mo- ment's time in which to collect my faculties I said, "Show me the question." The superintendent handed me a big, hot soda-biscuit, as if it were a book. I examined it care- fully on both sides, but could not find on it anything that looked like printing. The superintendent thereupon pulled the two halves apart, and showed me the question stamped in Thibetan characters around the inside of the biscuit about half an inch from the edge. I found in the queer- looking letters no clue to the answer, and in an agony of shame at being forced to confess to a Sunday-school of "Holy Monopolists" that I did not know who was the first progressive-euchre player that died in Alaska and was brought back amid the mourning of a nation I awoke. For a moment I could not recover my mental hold upon life. I was apparently in a place where I had never yet been, and over me were standing two extraordinary figures that I could not remember ever before to have seen. One of them, a tall, powerful man with black, bushy, Circassian- like hair, and blazing blue eyes, was dressed in a long, spotted reindeer-skin kukhlánka1 and high fur boots, while the other, who seemed to be an official of some kind, had on a blue uniform with a double row of brass buttons down the front of his coat, and was holding over my head a kero- sene lamp. "What 's the matter, Mr. Kennan?" inquired the figure in the reindeer-skin kukhlánka. "You have been moaning as if you were in pain."

As memory slowly resumed its throne I recognized in the speaker my exile traveling companion Peterson, and in

1 A very heavy fur blouse or overshirt covering the body from the neck to the calf of the leg, and confined about the waist with a sash.