The Boy Nihilist | Page 8

you think you will be sent to Siberia?" asked Barnwell.
"I am sure of it."
"For so slight an offense?"
"Many a slighter one has consigned better men than I am to the mines of Siberia for life. As for you, you have somehow offended the tyrant."
"I cannot understand how. I brought a letter to him from a man in New York."
"What man?"
"One Paul Zobriskie."
"Paul Zobriskie!" exclaimed the man, clutching the bars that grated the window of his door. "Do you know him?"
"No; I was simply on the point of sailing for Europe when he approached and asked me to deliver a letter to Prince Mastowix. I did so, and you know the rest."
"Paul Zobriskie is the greatest terror that Russian tyranny knows. He is a bugbear; but why should he be in correspondence with Prince Mastowix?"
"I know nothing about it."
"There is a mystery somewhere," mused the man.
"If there is, I know nothing about it."
"Were I at liberty, I would take pains to find out what this mystery is."
"But how can they hold me?"
"By the right of might; just as they hold me. Once in their clutches, there is no escape. Even were you known to be innocent of any crime, it would make no difference. The innocent and the guilty are treated alike in Russia. There is no liberty--no justice in the land. But the time will come when the Nihilists will shake the tyranny out of the empire with dynamite!" said he, fiercely.
"Silence, slaves!" cried a rough voice near by, and the next instant the burly form of a keeper stood between them. "Nineteen, you have already made trouble enough. You must have the knout," and unlocking the door of his cell, he seized him by the hair of the head and dragged him out and down through the corridor.
Two minutes later the blood was almost curdled in Barnwell's veins by the shrieking of that same poor wretch, undergoing punishment.
But he was not brought back to his cell, and what became of him Barnwell never knew.
His thoughts, however, were soon turned from the wretched stranger to himself, and to wondering what his own fate would be.
One thing he felt certain of, and that was that Prince Mastowix would never assist him in regaining his liberty.
The letter he had so accommodatingly brought from New York undoubtedly contained something of great importance, but why he should suffer on account of it he could not see.
Could he but make his case known to the American minister, he would undoubtely be given his liberty, but this he could not do, and it was the prince who prevented him.
He had resolved that the young American should be sent to Siberia, even knowing that he was guilty of no wrong; and even Tobasco, with all the proofs of the prince's perfidy in his possession, paid no attention to Barnwell, although he knew him to be simply a victim. Liberty or life was nothing to him so long as he could make a point with the prefect of police and secure unsuspected game. Such is the Russian sense of right and justice.
Day after day dragged its slow length along, and all the while Prince Mastowix was in a dreadful state of uncertainty. No trace had been found of the missing paper; and after preferring a charge of assault against William Barnwell, who was described as a spy of the Nihilists, a form of trial was gone through with, as with others who were not allowed to be present, and a verdict rendered up against him, condemning him to Siberia during the pleasure of the government.
That is the way the tyrants of Russia serve people, whether guilty or innocent, if they happen to incur their displeasure in any way.
Is it any wonder that they revolt, or that they resort to secret intrigue, to dynamite, and all other means, however bloody the unthinking world may regard them, to give back some of the terror which they have dealt out for centuries? No, it is no wonder at all.
Two weeks William Barnwell languished in the filthy cell of that Bastile, when he was finally marched out into the courtyard one day, in company with some fifty other wretches who had been sentenced to exile.
And what a change those two weeks had produced in that handsome American youth! Unwashed, unkempt, dazed by the light of day he had been kept from so long, his most intimate friends would not have known him.
The detail was ready, and outside of the prison were hundreds of loving ones, waiting to take a last farewell of fathers, brothers, lovers, whom they would probably never see again. But Barnwell had no one waiting for him, and it seemed that life, hope, ambition, everything was crushed out of him.
CHAPTER IV.
SWIFT RETRIBUTION.
Retribution does not always go with justice, however,