He sighed.  So that thing before him was Big Ivan—Big Ivan the giant, the man without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned freebooter of the seas, who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a nervous system so low that what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely a tickle to him.  Well, well, trust these Nulato Indians to find Big Ivan’s nerves and trace them to the roots of his quivering soul.  They were certainly doing it.  It was inconceivable that a man could suffer so much and yet live.  Big Ivan was paying for his low order of nerves.  Already he had lasted twice as long as any of the others.

Subienkow felt that he could not stand the Cossack’s sufferings much longer.  Why didn’t Ivan die?  He would go mad if that screaming did not cease.  But when it did cease, his turn would come.  And there was Yakaga awaiting him, too, grinning at him even now in anticipation—Yakaga, whom only last week he had kicked out of the fort, and upon whose face he had laid the lash of his dog-whip.  Yakaga would attend to him.  Doubtlessly Yakaga was saving for him more refined tortures, more exquisite nerve-racking.  Ah! that must have been a good one, from the way Ivan screamed.  The squaws bending over him stepped back with laughter and clapping of hands.  Subienkow saw the monstrous thing that had been perpetrated, and began to laugh hysterically.  The Indians looked at him in wonderment that he should laugh.  But Subienkow could not stop.

This would never do.  He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings slowly dying away.  He strove to think of other things, and began reading back in his own life.  He remembered his mother and his father, and the little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had taught him dancing and sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire.  Once more he saw Paris , and dreary London , and gay Vienna , and Rome .  And once more he saw that wild group of youths who had dreamed, even as he, the dream of an independent Poland with a king of Poland on the throne at Warsaw .  Ah, there it was that the long trail began.  Well, he had lasted longest.  One by one, beginning with the two executed at St.