"Everything," replied the Cossack.
"Stupái!" [Pass on!] said the lieutenant; and the pale-faced man shouldered his bag and joined the ranks of the "received" at the eastern end of the shed.
"The photographs are a new thing," whispered Colonel Yagodkin to me; "and only a part of the exiles have them. They are intended to break up the practice of exchanging names and identities."
"But why should they wish to exchange names?" I inquired.
"If a man is sentenced to hard labor at the mines," he replied, "and has a little money, he always tries to buy secretly the name and identity of some poor devil of a colonist who longs desperately for a drink of vódka, or who wants money with which to gamble. Of course the convoy officer has no means of preventing this sort of transaction, because he cannot possibly remember the names and faces of the four or five hundred men in his party. If the convict succeeds in finding a colonist who is willing to sell his name, he takes the colonist's place and is assigned a residence in some village, while the colonist takes the convict's place and goes to the mines. Hundreds of hard-labor convicts escape in this way."[1]
"Hassán Abdállimof!" called the examining officer. No one moved.
"Hassán Abdállimof!" shouted the Cossack orderly, more loudly.
"Go on, Stumpy; that's you!" said half a dozen exiles in an undertone as they pushed out of the throng a short, thickly set, bow-legged Tatar, upon whose flat, swarthy face there was an expression of uncertainty and bewilderment.
"He doesn't know Russian, your High Nobility," said one of the exiles respectfully, "and he is glupováti "[dull-witted].
- ↑ I shall explain this practice of exchanging names more fully in a later chapter.
