The old man studied Peter carefully for a minute. “You speak,” he said finally, “as if you had spent twenty years in the Governor’s prison, instead of twenty years in America.” “I spent time enough in his prison,” said Peter. Katerin uttered an involuntary exclamation of surprise. “Here! You were in the old prison here?” she asked. “I was,” said Peter, with a grim tightening of his lips. “But you are too young to have been an exile!” gasped Michael. “If you had been one of—us, I can well understand. There are many who have been here for long years—they have known the chains, they have known a lifetime in cells. And still, they have no stomach for meeting the Governor face to face. That is because they know Kirsakoff—and that he is not a man who can be hunted like a rabbit.” “I also knew him,” said Peter. “I doubt if I will fear him, even if I come face to face with him—and he knows me for a Russian, and by my true name.” “Oh! So you knew Kirsakoff?” asked Katerin. “Then it will not be so difficult for you to find him.” “I knew him too well,” said Peter, now beginning to fear they would settle themselves against helping him to find Kirsakoff, and seeing that he would have to take them into his confidence if they were to be of any help to him. “I knew him when I was a boy here—and I have an old score to pay off. I have come to pay it, and I shall not be kept from finding Kirsakoff, even though he were the new Czar.” “You must have been an unfortunate to have been in the prison,” said Katerin. She was still gazing at him with curious eyes, as if she could not believe that he was really telling the truth about himself—as if she thought he was making his story fit his necessity for finding Kirsakoff and was making it as serious as possible to induce them to help him. “My father was an unfortunate—a political—here in the Valley of Despair.” “Indeed, was he?” asked Michael, with renewed interest. “You mean that he was here in the time that Kirsakoff was Governor?” “In the same time—when I was a boy,” said Peter, and looked at Katerin. Her face was full of shocked surprise. She seemed horror-stricken at the idea, and he wondered why she should think it so strange and so terrible. He rather expected that she would see that they would all be drawn together in common trouble, and have a common hatred for Kirsakoff. “How strange,” she said, turning to the lamp. “Then you are one of us—no wonder you seek Kirsakoff.” “Ay, that is a new string to the fiddle,” agreed Michael. “I can understand now that you should want to find the Governor. Perhaps you are right in this matter after all—and I must think it over. You have reason enough, yet it is a serious thing for me to put you in danger.” Peter felt better at this new attitude of the old man, and thought that now they regarded him with a more friendly eye. He was, in truth, one of them, and there is a strong bond of sympathy between exiles and the children of exiles.