Lost Face — Jack London

Subienkow felt that he could not stand the Cossacks sufferings much longer Why didnt 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 anticipationmdash 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 nerveracking 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

There had been no chance to escape From the beginning when he dreamed the fiery dream of Poland s independence he had become a puppet in the hands of Fate From the beginning at Warsaw at St Petersburg in the Siberian mines in Kamtchatka on the crazy boats of the fur thieves Fate had been driving him to this end Without doubt in the foundations of the world was graved this end for him for him who was so fine and sensitive whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin who was a dreamer and a poet and an artist Before he was dreamed of it had been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that constituted him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery and to die in this far land of night in this dark place beyond the last boundaries of the world