The inspector filled his mouth with air and slowly blew it out again.

“Which prison is he from?” he asked the convoy soldier.

The soldier told him, and reminded him of the chains on the dead man’s feet.

“I’ll have them taken off; we have got a smith about, the Lord be thanked,” said the inspector, and blew up his cheeks again; he went towards the door, slowly letting out the air.

“Why has this happened?” Nekhludoff asked the doctor.

The doctor looked at him through his spectacles.

“Why has what happened?  Why they die of sunstroke, you mean?  This is why:  They sit all through the winter without exercise and without light, and suddenly they are taken out into the sunshine, and on a day like this, and they march in a crowd so that they get no air, and sunstroke is the result.”

“Then why are they sent out?”

“Oh, as to that, go and ask those who send them.  But may I ask who are you?”

“I am a stranger.”

“Ah, well, good-afternoon; I have no time.”  The doctor was vexed; he gave his trousers a downward pull, and went towards the beds of the sick.

“Well, how are you getting on?” he asked the pale man with the crooked mouth and bandaged neck.

Meanwhile the madman sat on a bed, and having finished his cigarette, kept spitting in the direction of the doctor.

Nekhludoff went down into the yard and out of the gate past the firemen’s horses and the hens and the sentinel in his brass helmet, and got into the trap, the driver of which had again fallen asleep.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE CONVICT TRAIN.

When Nekhludoff came to the station, the prisoners were all seated in railway carriages with grated windows.  Several persons, come to see them off, stood on the platform, but were not allowed to come up to the carriages.

The convoy was much troubled that day.  On the way from the prison to the station, besides the two Nekhludoff had seen, three other prisoners had fallen and died of sunstroke.  One was taken to the nearest police station like the first two, and the other two died at the railway station. [In Moscow, in the beginning of the eighth decade of this century, five convicts died of sunstroke in one day on their way from the Boutyrki prison to the Nijni railway station.] The convoy men were not troubled because five men who might have been alive died while in their charge.  This did not trouble them, but they were concerned lest anything that the law required in such cases should be omitted.  To convey the bodies to the places appointed, to deliver up their papers, to take them off the lists of those to be conveyed to Nijni—­all this was very troublesome, especially on so hot a day.