AN INCIDENT OF THE MARCH
This is what Mary Pavlovna and Katusha saw when they reached the scence. The officer, a sturdy fellow with fair moustaches, frowning, and uttering words of coarse abuse, stood rubbing the palm of his right hand, which he had hurt by striking a prisoner in the face. Before him stood a tall thin convict with half his head shaven, and dressed in a cloak too short for him and trousers much too short, wiping his bleeding face with one hand and holding a shrieking little girl wrapped in a shawl with the other.
“I’ll give it you –. I’ll teach you to argue –. You’re to give her to the women!” shouted the officer. “Now then, on with them!”
The convict (who was exiled by his village commune) had been carrying his little daughter all the way from Tomsk, where his wife had died of typhus. The officer had now ordered him to be manacled. The exile’s explanations that he could not carry the child if he were manacled irritated the officer, who happened to be in a bad temper, and he gave the trublesome prisoner a beating for not obeying at once.
A convoy soldier stood near the injured convict, together with a black-bearded prisoner with manacles on one hand, who looked gloomily from under his brows, now at the injured prisoner with the little girl. The officer repeated his order to the soldiers to take away the girl. The murmur among the prisoners grew louder.
“All the way from Tomsk they were not put on,” came a hoarse voice from some one in the rear. “It’s a child, and not a puppy.”
“What’s he to do with the lassie? That’s not the law,” said some one else.