Treasury was successfully driven without detection, entrance to the vault was obtained by removing one of the heavy stone slabs in the floor, and the young women carried away and concealed a million and a half of rúbles in available cash. Before they could remove the stolen money to a place of perfect safety, however, and make good their own escape, they were arrested, together with their confederate, the runaway convict, and thrown into prison. The confederate turned state's evidence and showed the police where to find the stolen money, and the amateur burglars were sent to Siberia. Madam Róssikova, as the older woman and the originator of the plot, was condemned to penal servitude at the mines, while Miss Alexéiova was sentenced merely to forced colonization with deprivation of certain civil rights. After her marriage in Siberia to the missionary Dubróf, she was permitted to reside, under police supervision, in Krasnoyársk.
I had seen in Siberia, long before my arrival at Krasnoyársk, almost every variety of political offender from the shy and timid school-girl of sixteen to the hardened and embittered terrorist; but I had never before happened to make the acquaintance of a political treasury robber, and when Mr. Shamárin proposed to take me to call upon Madam Dubróva, I looked forward to the experience with a good deal of curiosity. She had been described to me by Colonel Nóvikof, in Chíta, as nothing more than a common burglar who had assumed the mask of a political offender with the hope of getting a lighter sentence; but as Colonel Nóvikof was both ignorant and prejudiced, and as, moreover, pretending to be a political with a view to getting a lighter sentence for burglary would be very much like pleading guilty to murder in the hope of getting a lighter sentence for simple trespass, I did not place much confidence in his statements.[1]
- ↑ Colonel Nóvikof sat as one of the judges in the court-martial that tried Madam Róssikova and Miss Alexéiova, but he was either incapable of understanding the characters of such women or he was trying to deceive me
