"I'll artel you all. He who doesn't speak shall---- Stay!" and his keen eyes ran rapidly over the crowding faces. "Yes! I remember. You!" pointing a finger like a bayonet at Ignatz, the burly ex-convict. "Step out here! I have seen you busy among them. Are you president?" "I was, Excellency. But this was quite against my notions. I urged them against it. It was foolishness." "I'll president you! Knock off all those chains," he cried to his men, "and bring them here. It is right the president should wear the chains of office." They prized open the fetters of the dead and wounded, and hammered them on to the burly one's arms and legs, forty-five pounds weight in addition to the five he carried of right--or wrong. Then, chuckling at his Solomon-wisdom, the captain set the convoy in motion, with the decuple-burdened Ignatz as leader, and watched his heavy progression with a connoisseur tilt of the head and a smile of malevolent gratification. And the abjects, quickened and saddened by this clap of sudden death, plodded gloomily behind the creaking carts. For the carts had become elevated to the dignity of biers, and the motley crowd had become even more of a funeral procession than it was before. CHAPTER VII HOW THE SEEDS BORE FRUIT AND FLOWER The sleeping kameras of the half-way house were quieter than usual that night. So far as absence of noise was concerned it was almost possible to sleep. The gloom of the day's happenings hung heavy on them all. Perhaps the future also cast its shadow. Ignatz, the chain-bearer, lay on the ground near Pavlof and Palma, and whenever he moved he rattled like an armoury. The short remainder of the afternoon's march had told on him, strong as he was. They had seen the veins swell out in his neck and forehead till they looked like bursting. And his eyes, when he stumbled into the stockade, were dim and shot with blood; partly no doubt with the weight of his burden, for where five-pound fetters are a burden fifty-pound are torture; and more, perhaps, from the injustice of it, for he had spoken truly when he said the rest had gone against his advice. "Can you stand it, my friend?" asked Pavlof. "No, barin." "They will see that and take them off." "Yes, barin." "If you can get through to-morrow, the next day is rest day, and then we change convoys, and the new man may not be a devil." "Yes, barin." They did what they could to ease his burdened state, fed him, gave him drink, packed his fetters with rags torn from their clothing; but not much was possible to them, and Ignatz lay brooding all night like a spirit in chains.