"Sometimes they are flogged; but the Russian peasant is accustomed to flogging and thinks but little of it. More often they are not flogged. They have, perhaps, a heavier chain, for the convicts all wear chains--we have an advantage over them there--and they are put on poorer diet for a time. They lose the remission of sentence they would obtain by good behaviour, that is all, even when they are recognized, but as a rule they take care not to give themselves up at the prison they left, but at one many hundred miles from it. In the course of the summer their hair has grown again. They assert stoutly that they are free labourers who have lost their papers, and who cannot earn their living through the winter. The authorities know, of course, that they are escaped convicts, but they have no means of identifying them. They cannot send them the rounds of a hundred convict establishments; so instead of a man being entered as Alexis Stumpoff, murderer, for instance, he is put down by the name he gives, and the word vagabond is added. The next year they may break out again; but in time the hardships they suffer in the woods become distasteful and they settle down to their prison life, and then, after perhaps six, perhaps ten years of good conduct they are released and allowed to settle where they will. So you see, Godfrey Bullen, how hopeless is the chance of escape." "Not at all," Godfrey said. "These men are most of them peasants--men without education and without enterprise, incapable of forming any plan, and wholly without resources in themselves. I feel as certain of escaping as I am of being here at present. I don't say that I shall succeed the first time, but, as you say yourself, there is no difficulty in getting away, and if I fail in one direction I will try in another." CHAPTER VI. AN ESCAPE. The evenings were spent principally in conversations about Siberia, Godfrey being eager to learn everything that he could about its geography and peoples. Alexis told him all he knew as to the mountains and rivers, the various native tribes, the districts where the villages were comparatively numerous, and the mighty forests that, stretching away to the Arctic Sea, could hardly be said to be explored. Books and paper were forbidden to the political prisoners, and so strict were the regulations that the warders would not under any considerations bring them in. But Godfrey wrote all the particulars that he judged might in any way be useful with a burnt piece of stick upon the table as Alexis gave them, and then learned them by heart, washing them off after he had done so.