The riot was as real to him as the prison carts were to Stepan Trofimovitch.

And flitting to and fro in the crowd of "rioters" who gazed open-eyed at him, he seemed to see Pyotr Stepanovitch, who had egged them on--Pyotr Stepanovitch, whom he hated and whose image had never left him since yesterday.
"Rods!" he cried even more unexpectedly.

A dead silence followed.
From the facts I have learnt and those I have conjectured, this must have been what happened at the beginning; but I have no such exact information for what followed, nor can I conjecture it so easily.

There are some facts, however.
In the first place, rods were brought on the scene with strange rapidity; they had evidently been got ready beforehand in expectation by the intelligent chief of the police.

Not more than two, or at most three, were actually flogged, however; that fact I wish to lay stress on.