of the Polish roads; he was a red-haired, muscular chap with cold grey eyes; he could speak German, and was very intimately acquainted with the minutiœ of prison life.
Our friend did not like to speak very much of his past for more or less well-founded reasons, and indeed we all of us took each other on trust, at least we ostensibly took each other on trust, for, privately, not one of us even trusted himself.
When our second comrade, a withered little mannikin with small teeth, always pressed together sceptically when our second comrade, I say, speaking of himself, said that he had formerly been a student at the University of Moscow, I and the soldier accepted the statement as a fact. In reality it was all one to us whether he had been a student, a bailiff's man, or a thief. The only matter of any importance to us was that at the moment of our first acquaintance he stood on our level, in other words: he was starving, engaged the particular attention of the police in the towns, was an object of suspicion to the peasants in the villages, hated everyone with the hatred of an impotent, bated, and starving wild beast, and was intent on a universal vengeance in a word, he was of precisely the same kidney as ourselves.
Misfortune is the most durable cement for the joining together of natures even diametrically opposed to each other, and we were all convinced of our right to account ourselves unfortunate.
