Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 02.djvu/15

Rh had decided to extend me clemency; so instead of being hanged or sent to the Siberian mines with most of my companions I was merely exiled to Ekaterinburg for a term of sixty months. During that time I was subjected to continuous surveillance, to hold no communication with my family or friends in Russia, and not engage in any occupation without express permission.

"But you've done nothing!" I protested. "The paper that you signed declared specifically that you favored peaceful measures; you merely said that if these measures failed"

Aksakoff smiled sadly. "You didn't have to be a criminal to be exiled," he explained. Political unreliability' was the sufficient cause, and the officers of the political police were sole judges of the case. You see, administrative exile, as they called it, was technically not a punishment."

"Oh, that's different," I replied. "If you were merely forced to live away from home"

"And to make a journey longer than New York to Los Angeles dressed in prison clothes and handcuffed to a condemned felon, shuffling in irons so heavy that it was impossible to lift your feet, to be fed infrequently, and then on offal that nothing but a half-starved dog—or man—would touch," he interrupted bitterly. "My only consolation was that Nikakova had been also granted 'clemency' and accompanied me in exile.

"The officer commanding our escort came from a family some of whom and also suffered exile, and this made him pity us. He allowed to converse an hour a day, and several times he gave us food and tea from his own rations. It was from him that we learned that Proudhon and Matrona were agents provocateurs of the political police, paid spies whose duty was not only to worm their way into the confidence of unsuspecting children such as we, but to incite us to unlawful acts so we might be arrested and deported.

"Since I had no money and the Government did not care to fee me, I was graciously permitted to take service with a cobbler at Ekaterinburg, and Nikalova was allowed to do work for a seamstress. Presently I found a little cottage and she came to live with me."

"It must have been consolation to be married to the girl you loved, even in such terrible conditions" I began, but the cynicism of the look he gave me stopped my well-meant comment.



"I said she came to live with me," he repeated. Politicos' were not permitted marriage without special dispensation from the police, and this we could not get. We had no money to pay bribes. But whatever church and state might say, we were as truly man and wife as if we'd stood by the altar of St. Isaac and been married by the Patriarch. We pledged our love for time and all eternity kneeling on the floor of our mean cabin