hat he had been selling gold to the Government. Here they were
murdered."

Ivan stepped to the stove, took out a flaming stick and, bending over,
lighted a spot on the floor.

"Do you see these spots on the floor and on the wall? It is their
blood, the blood of Gavronsky. They died but they did not disclose the
whereabouts of the gold. It was taken out of a deep hole which they had
drifted into the bank of the river and was hidden in the cellar under
the shed. But Gavronsky gave nothing away. . . . AND LORD HOW I TORTURED
THEM! I burned them with fire; I bent back their fingers; I gouged out
their eyes; but Gavronsky died in silence."

He thought for a moment, then quickly said to me:

"I have heard all this from the peasants." He threw the log into the
stove and flopped down on the bench. "It's time to sleep," he snapped
out, and was still.

I listened for a long time to his breathing and his whispering to
himself, as he turned from one side to the other and smoked his pipe.

In the morning we left this scene of so much suffering and crime and on
the seventh day of our journey we came to the dense cedar wood growing
on the foothills of a long chain of mountains.

"From here," Ivan explained to me, "it is eighty versts to the next
peasant settlement. The people come to these woods to gather cedar nuts
but only in the autumn. Before then you will not meet anyone. Also you
will find many birds and beasts and a plentiful supply of nuts, so that
it will be possible for you to live here. Do you see this river? When
you want to find the peasants, follow along this stream and it will
guide you to them."

Ivan helped me build my mud hut. But it was not the genuine mud hut. It
was one formed by the tearing out of the roots of a great cedar, that
had probably fallen in some wild storm, which made for me the deep hole
as the room for my house and flanked this on one side with a wall of
mud held fast among the upturned roots. Overhanging ones formed also
the framework into which we interlaced the poles and branches to make
a roof, finished off with stones for stability and snow for warmth.
The front of the hut was ever open but was constantly protected by the
guardian naida. In that snow-covered den I spent two months like summer
without seeing any other human being and without touch with the outer
world where such important events were transpiring. In that grave under
the roots of the fallen tree I lived before the face o