The officer in charge of the political prisoners and their wolfish keepers was one Captain Sokolof. Sokolof was in most respects a typical gendarme official, obstinate, conservative, none too quick of understanding outside the circumscribed routine of his profession. But, on the other hand, he was not intentionally more brutal than circumstances seemed to him to demand. He carried out the instructions transmitted to him from headquarters to the very last letter. Of his own accord he never added to them, and that was much. His position was not without its anomalies, but he did not allow them to trouble him. Colonel Zazarin, as Governor, held supreme power, but Sokolof was in charge of the politicals, and was answerable for them, not to Zazarin, but to the Minister of the Interior. It was a command within a command, but as Zazarin never interfered with Sokolof they got on well enough and rarely clashed. Sokolof's right-hand man was one Lieutenant Razia, a reduced copy of his chief, smaller in body, smaller in mind, if anything still more stubbornly wedded to the last letter of the law as demeaned by the Ministry of the Interior, since all his hopes of advancement lay therein; withal something of a brute in his callosity and harshness to those in his power, and hated accordingly, both in the prison and out of it. He was a low-browed, black-a-vised fellow, with a powerful projecting under-jaw, and most of his head behind his ears like a monkey's. Pavlof took a dislike to him at first sight, and never had reason to change his opinion. Captain Sokolof had had a sharp attack of typhus in the summer, and was still unfit for duty. During his sickness and slow convalescence his duties and his mantle had fallen on Lieutenant Razin, and Razin made the most of them. So much so, indeed, that the souls of the prisoners--to whom Razin, if he could have managed it, would have permitted no such high indulgence--were stirred within them to the supreme point of revolt. And the revolt of the utterly helpless against irresponsible power armed to the teeth is one of the strange sights of the world. An in-prisoner at Kara possesses nothing save his bare life, and such trifling ameliorations as the irresponsibles of their grace permit him. These are at best capricious, and when the small mind finds itself in power it loses no opportunity of self-magnification by the arbitrary exhibition thereof. It fusses and worries and curtails privileges which, small as they are, are still to the prisoner very spice of the life that is drearier than death. Under such conditions the trodden worms sometimes turn, and then comes the amazing sight of the powerless fighting the all-powerful, ants _versus_ giants, a struggle that stirs one even in the hearing.