. Siberia and the exile system. e of Yeniseisk, and didso with an elaborate imitation of my manner. If I went toanother part of the store and expressed a desire for writ-ing-paper, he went to the same part of the store and alsoexpressed a desire for writing-paper. The intention to beoffensive was so unmistakable, and the manifestation of itso extraordinary and deliberate, that I at once suspectedsome sort of police trap. No two sane and sober privatecitizens would follow perfect strangers into a bookstoreand behave towards them in this studied and evidentlypreconcerted manner without some defi
. Siberia and the exile system. e of Yeniseisk, and didso with an elaborate imitation of my manner. If I went toanother part of the store and expressed a desire for writ-ing-paper, he went to the same part of the store and alsoexpressed a desire for writing-paper. The intention to beoffensive was so unmistakable, and the manifestation of itso extraordinary and deliberate, that I at once suspectedsome sort of police trap. No two sane and sober privatecitizens would follow perfect strangers into a bookstoreand behave towards them in this studied and evidentlypreconcerted manner without some definite object. Icould imagine no other object than the provocation of afight, and as I could not afford just at that time to engagein a fight, there was nothing left for me to do but to transactmy business as speedily as possible and to get out of the 382 SIBERIA store. The men followed us to the sidewalk, but did notspeak to us, and we lost sight of them in the I asked the proprietor of the store the next day if he. knew the men he replied that he did not. In view of themass of documents, letters, and politically incendiary ma-terial of all sorts that we had concealed about our personsand in our baggage, and in view of the tremendous inter-ests that we had at stake generally, such episodes as these, THE GREAT SIBERIAN ROAD IN WINTER 383 whatever their significance may have been, were very dis-quieting. Long before I reached the frontier of EuropeanRussia I became so nervous, and so suspicious of every-thing unusual, that I could hardly sleep at night. Wednesday, January 20th, having spent as much time inKrasnoyarsk as we thought we could spend there profi-tably, and having recovered from the fatigue of the jour-ney from Irkutsk, we set out for the town of Minusinsk,which is situated on the northern watershed of the Altaiand Sayan mountains, near the Mongolian frontier, in whatis half seriously and half jocosely called The SiberianItaly. The distance from Krasnoyars
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