s
that the long trail began. Well, he had lasted longest. One by one,
beginning with the two executed at St. Petersburg, he took up the count
of the passing of those brave spirits. Here one had been beaten to death
by a jailer, and there, on that bloodstained highway of the exiles, where
they had marched for endless months, beaten and maltreated by their
Cossack guards, another had dropped by the way. Always it had been
savagery--brutal, bestial savagery. They had died--of fever, in the
mines, under the knout. The last two had died after the escape, in the
battle with the Cossacks, and he alone had won to Kamtchatka with the
stolen papers and the money of a traveller he had left lying in the snow.

It had been nothing but savagery. All the years, with his heart in
studios, and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery. He
had purchased his life with blood. Everybody had killed. He had killed
that traveller for his passports. He had proved that he was a man of
parts by duelling with two Russian officers on a single day. He had had
to prove himself in order to win to a place among the fur-thieves. He
had had to win to that place. Behind him lay the thousand-years-long
road across all Siberia and Russia. He could not escape that way. The
only way was ahead, across the dark and icy sea of Bering to Alaska. The
way had led from savagery to deeper savagery. On the scurvy-rotten ships
of the fur-thieves, out of food and out of water, buffeted by the
interminable storms of that stormy sea, men had become animals. Thrice
he had sailed east from Kamtchatka. And thrice, after all manner of
hardship and suffering, the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka. There
had been no outlet for escape, and he could not go back the way he had
come, for the mines and the knout awaited him.

Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east. He had been with
those who first found the fabled Seal Islands; but he had not returned
with them to share the wealth of furs in the mad orgies of Kamtchatka. He
had sworn never to go back. He knew that to win to those dear capitals
of Europe he must go on. So he had changed ships and remained in the
dark new land. His comrades were Slavonian hunters and Russian
adventurers, Mongols and Tartars and Siberian aborigines; and through the
savages of the new world they had cut a path of blood. They had
massacred whole villages that refused to furnish the fur-tribute; an