Of earning a living in the ordinary sense there was evidently no question here. One would suppose the gentleman to have been living on private means.
ESCAPED CONVICT-TRAMP (BRODYAGA)
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“Money? Oh, I took whatever there was to take!”
“Well, tell me just what that means,” I asked him. And he thereupon explained his theory of life.
“Above everything, it’s my motto that ‘Self’s the man.’ I don’t hold with joint-stock business in our way of life. Thieves make bad partners, you know. You run the chance of being murdered or split on at every turn; so I always work on my own hook.”
He then related how he “worked” at burglary, pocket-picking, or petty thefts, each as occasion served.
“Of course,” he observed, “sometimes you have a bit of bad luck and get caught. Then off you go to Siberia, and have to begin all over again. I expect I shall go on all my life ringing the changes on Europe and Asia,” he concluded, with perfect composure.
I realised from the narrations of this man and other criminals the astonishing numbers belonging to this vagabond class. It is generally recruited from the ranks of those condemned to transportation for the less serious offences; but some among its members have been sentenced to penal servitude, and have then “swopped.” As soon as the sun of spring shines out, not one of them remains at his place of exile; they all manage to get away and make for European Russia. They usually choose byways and tracks known only to themselves through the taigà or primeval forest, but occasionally they wander quite calmly along the great Moscow high road—until the completion of the railway the only regular way of transit between Eastern Siberia and Europe. We ourselves often met these tramps on the road, travelling in couples or in quite considerable bands. They came along in their prison clothes, a bundle and a small kettle on their backs; always skirting the edge of the forest, so as to vanish within its recesses if need be. At sight of our party they would stop for a chat with the convicts, among whom they often found old acquaintances. The officers and soldiers seemed not to trouble their heads about them in the slightest degree.