"From a long way off;--farther than you can see."
"I expect you have already run away once?" asked the old man with a
peculiar intonation of voice.
"Certainly I did not fly."
"Did you confess it or deny it?"
"You can confess if you choose to."
"What is your name?"
"Ivan the Distant. If you like you can also call me 'The Near'; it's all
the same to me."
"Ah well, you suit us." Ivan's good humour increased perceptibly. "And
what are you thinking of doing now?"
"That will be seen soon enough. I have got twenty years."
"What? Hard labour?"
"Did you think I meant sentinel duty?"
"Well, that is another point in which we are similar."
Two days had passed. The weary convicts and the no less weary warders
had not been long asleep in the prison which stood in the midst of an
impenetrable wood, when the sentinel suddenly heard a strange noise.
There was the sound of a human body falling on the ground once--twice,
and then the clanking of a chain. A dark mass rolled towards the wood.
The soldier aimed hastily, a flash cut through the darkness, and the
echoes of the shot woke the forest; a cry died away in the distance.
"Ivan the Distant is hit," said Ivan the Forgetful, and darted blindly
forwards at random into the mysterious realm of the aged giant trees
which towered like shadows in the darkness of the night. Shots and cries
echoed behind him. The wood seemed to grow alive; it clutched at him
with hard horny hands, it seized the skirts of his coat and dug sharp
claws into his trembling body, it threw obstacles in his way so that he
stumbled, it drew the ground from under his feet so that he fell into a
depth; wet grass sprinkled his face with dew, and he found that he had
fallen down a steep declivity. He recovered from the shock and saw that
his fall had been arrested by the projecting stump of a tree. He raised
his head and listened. There was deep darkness and silence above him and
beneath him; only from time to time he saw the faint reflection of a
flash and heard the rolling echo of distant shots. Ivan climbed
carefully lower down and crawled farther on, looking round him on all
sides like a beast of prey and disregarding the pain of his torn hands
and knees. "It is all up with Ivan the Distant," he said to himself. "He
had no luck." And he crept on farther and farther, without knowing
whither, into the impenetrable darkness of the warm spring night.