after which there was whispering again for a moment or two, and finally silence. We did not hear another sound from the officers' room that night. Why that revolver-shot was fired through our partition from a perfectly dark and still room at half-past two o'clock in the morning we never ascertained. My own impression is that somebody desired to experiment upon us for fun; and if any one had questioned me about the incident on the following day, I should have said that pistol-shots in the night were so common in American hotels as to excite little or no remark, and that the only thing that surprised us was the absence of a dead body in the morning.
Whether or not the police discovered, during our stay in Chíta, that we were visiting the political convicts every day I have no means of knowing. That they became aware of it afterward I infer from the fact that the only letter I subsequently received from there, a perfectly innocent communication from the merchant Némerof, was delivered to me open — the end of the envelope having been cut off with a pair of scissors.
Up to the time of our arrival in Chíta I had carried the most important and compromising of my papers and documents in a leathern belt around my body; but they finally became so bulky and burdensome that it seemed necessary to make some other disposition of them, and in view of the possibility, if not the probability, of a police search, I determined to conceal them. The greater part of them I put into the hollow sides of a wooden box that I made for the purpose, and that was ostensibly intended to keep our dishes and tea-things in. Such a box I could carry from our sleigh to the house at every post-station without appearing to set any particular value upon it, and I could thus keep it constantly under my eye without exciting either the suspicion of the police or the cupidity of thieves. All travelers carried such boxes, and it was highly improbable that anybody would ever wonder what was in it. It explained
