Chapter II

Ivan, as always, maintained a portentous silence. Kiriushka was not at all interested in whatever they were talking about; he lay thinking his own thoughts,--mostly about an accordeon, the purchase of which was his most cherished dream. Theodot, too, who lay leaning upon his elbow, was silent for a long while. He was a strong, flat-chested _moujik_, who at the beginning of the summer had not been considered by the farm hands as one of them, because he wore a short sheepskin coat, without a waistline and without folds in its skirts,--which was the kind worn by the Tartars of Kazan. He had seemed a stranger to the school-boy as well. Just as he liked the cheerful composure of Pashka, the smoothness of his mannerisms, his sun-burned face, so he was not disposed to intimacy by the face of Theodot, also calm but devoid of any expression, large, ashen-gray, wrinkled, with sparse moustaches, always wet from the slavering caused by his pipe; his whitish, weather-beaten lips were turned considerably outward. Theodot was listening attentively, but did not put in a single word during Pashka’s narrative,--only now and then he would give a consumptive cough and spit into the straw. And at first the conversation was sustained only by the dumbfounded school-boy and the old man.

“What are you lyin’ about nothin’ at all for?” said the old man indifferently, upon hearing the boastful declaration of Pashka. “What sort of a man could you have killed? Where?”

“Bust my eyes if I’m lyin’!” responded Pashka warmly, turning in the old man’s direction. “Last year, on Assumption. Not only was it wrote up in all the papers,--it was even in the order sent to the regiment.”

“Well, where was it you killed him?”

“Why, in the Caucasus, in the Zukhdens. Honest to God! Of course, I ain’t agoin’ to lie about it; I didn’t do it all single-handed,--Koslov also fired a shot; he’s also one of ours, from the Eletzkaya province. I wasn’t the only one that got the thanks for it; the division commander thanked him too, in front of all the men lined up, and rewarded us with a rouble each, right off; but then, I know without any mistake that it was me that winged him.”

“What him?” asked the high-school student.

“Why, a convict; this Cheorchian, now.”

“Hold on,” the old man interrupted him. “You just tell the whole thing sensibly. Where was you stationed?”

“There he goes again!” said Pashka with assumed vexation. “There’s a queer fellow,--won’t believe nothing. We was stationed at these New Ceniyaks, now....”

“I know the place,” said the old man. “We, too, was stationed there for eighteen days.”

“There, you see now,--that means I ain’t just making it up as I go along, for I can tell you how this happened, just about. We wasn’t stationed for no eighteen days then, brother, but for a whole year and seven months; as for these here convicts, we was in duty bound to escort them up to the very Zukhdens. These here convicts, now, was the most important criminals what could possibly be,--rebels, they was. So then, ten of them in all was caught in the mountains and put in our keeping....”

“Hold on,” interrupted the high-school student, imitating the old man, and feeling his hands turning to ice; “but how was it you told me that you’d never get to shooting any rebels,--that you’d liefer shoot any officer who might order you to fire at them?”

“Well, I wouldn’t let my own father off, when need be,” answered Pashka, throwing a furtive glance at the student, and again turning to the old man. “Maybe I’d never have laid a finger on him, even, if he hadn’t taken it into his head to ruin us all; but no, he went in for foxiness and we might all have been sentenced to hard labour for a whole year. But as it turned out, it was all for the best; we got thanks and turned out to be a bit smarter than him. Just you listen, now,” he said, pretending that he was addressing the old man only. “We was leading them along, all fair and square. We didn’t have any of these carryings on, like beating them, now, for example, or urging them on with the butt-end of a gun.... But one of them,--a sort of a skinny fellow, short of stature,--was walking along and complaining about his stomach all the time, asking us all the while to let him do something.... He just barely managed to tinkle along in his leg-irons. Then, at last, he approaches the superior officer: ‘Let me lie down in the cart.’ Well, he was allowed to do so, like he was real sick. Only by now we come to the Zukhdens. And the night’s as black as pitch, and it’s raining cats and dogs. We made ’em sit down on the front entrance, and watched ’em; each one of the soldiers had a little lantern in his hands, of course, while the superior officer went off into the room, to try the bars at the windows to see if they was all right, now, and hadn’t been filed away by some hidden file.”

“Absolutely,” said the old man. “According to law he’s got to take over everything in good shape.”

“That’s just what I’m talkin’ about,” confirmed Pashka, again hastily hiding a lit sulphur match in his cupped hands. “You know all this business, now, and that makes it interestin’ to be telling you about it. Well, the superior officer had gone off,” he went on, squeezing out the match and letting the smoke out of his nostrils, “he’d gone off, inspecting things, while we stand around, nodding our heads,--we wanted to sleep something dreadful,--when this here Cheorchian suddenly jumps up, and off ’round the corner with him! That means, you understand, that he had all this business figured out, while he was still in the cart; he had cut the strap around his legs that held the shackles, with the first thing that had come to his hand; had loosened them upon him, then picked ’em up in his hand, so,--” Pashka bent over and, spreading his legs, demonstrated how the prisoner had grabbed up the shackles, “and then had taken to his heels! But me and Koslov was no fools; we dropped our lanterns and took after him: Koslov ran around the corner too, whilst I went straight ahead to cut him off. I keep on running, but all the time I’m trying to catch the clink,--where his chains might be clanking, that is. It ain’t even worthwhile to be shootin’ at haphazard, thinks I. At last, I catch the sound,--and bang! I feel it go past him. I fire another shot,--again I hear it go by him. But Koslov is popping away right and left; like as not to get me any minute.... Then I got riled: ‘Ah,’ thinks I, ‘may your eyes bust out!’ I put the gun to my shoulder and I let’er go: glory be to the Lord, I got him,--I hear by the sound that he must have fallen down. I let out two more shots toward the same spot, and ran; and there he was sitting on his bottom on the ground. He’s sitting down, propped up with his hands in the dirt; his teeth are bared, and he’s rattlin’: ‘Quick,’ says he, ‘quick, Russ, stick your bayonet into me right here....’ Meaning his chest, that is. I charged with my bayonet on a run,--straight through his heart.... Why, the bayonet went right out at his back!”

“Good work!” said the old man. “Let’s have just one good puff.... Well, and where was Koslov at now?”

Pashka inhaled some smoke, deeply and quickly, and thrust the fag-end into the old man’s hand.

“Why, Koslov,” he answered, hurriedly and gaily, flattered by the praise, “why, Koslov is running, yelling with all his might: ‘Did you do for him?’ ‘I’ve done for him,’ says I, ‘let’s drag the carcass away....’ We took him by the shackles at once and dragged him back, to the porch.... I cut him down like a weed,” said he, changing his tone to a calmer and more self-satisfied one.

The old man cogitated for a while.

“And you say the officer rewarded you with a rouble each?”

“That’s straight,” answered Pashka. “He gave it to us right out of his own hands, with all the battalion lined up on parade.”

The old man, shaking his cap-covered head, spat into his palm and extinguished the cigarette end in the spittle.

Ivan, leisurely, through his teeth, drawled out:

“Well, it’s plain to be seen there’s lots of fools among the soldiers too.”

“How do you make that out?”

“Why, here’s how,” said Ivan, “you durn fool! What should you have done? You oughtn’t to have dragged him, but should have sent your mate with a report, and stood guard with a gun over the dead body. D’you understand now, or don’t you?”