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“Oh? I, you say? A-a-ah! Then take that!”

Silantiev, stepping lightly from stone to stone, crossed the river. Then he mingled–a conspicuous figure (owing to his apparent handlessness)–with the crowd. Somehow, on his departure, I felt ill at ease.

Twitching his fingers as though performing a conjuring trick, the old man continued to sit with his hands stretched over the embers. By this time his nose had swollen over the bridge, and bruises risen under his eyes which tended to obscure his vision. Indeed, as he sat there, sat mouthing with dark, bestreaked lips under a covering of hoary beard and moustache, I found that his bloodstained, disfigured, wrinkled, as it were “antique” face reminded me more than ever of those of great sinners of ancient times who abandoned this world for the forest and the desert.

“I have seen many proud folk,” he continued with a shake of his hatless head and its sparse hairs. “A fire may burn up quickly, and continue to burn fiercely, yet, like these embers, become turned to ashes, and. so lie smouldering till dawn. Young man, there you have something to think of. Nor are they merely my words. They are the words of the Holy Gospel itself.”

Ever descending, ever weighing more heavily upon us, the night was as black and hot and stifling as the previous one had been, albeit as kindly as a mother. Still the two fires on the opposite bank of the rivulet were aflame, and sending hot blasts of vapour across a seeming brook of gold.

Folding his arms upon his breast, the old man tucked the palms of his hands into his armpits, and settled himself more comfortably. Nevertheless, when I made as though to add more twigs and shavings to the embers he exclaimed imperiously:

“There is no need for that.”

“Why is there not? “

“Because that would cause the fire to be seen, and bring some of those men over here.”

Again, as he kicked away some boughs which I had just broken up, he repeated:

“There is no need for that, I tell you.”

Presently, there approached us through the shimmering fire light on the opposite bank two carpenters with boxes on their backs, and axes in their hands.

“Are all the rest of our men gone?” inquired the foreman of the newcomers.

“Yes,” replied one of them, a tall man with a drooping moustache and no beard.

“Well, ‘shun evil, and good will result.'”

“Aye, and we likewise wish to depart.”

“But a task ought not to be left unfinished. At dinner-time I sent Olesha to say that none of those fellows had better be released from work; but released they have been, and now the result is apparent! Presently, when they have drunk a little more of their poison, they will fire the barraque.”

Every time that the first of the two carpenters inhaled the smoke of my cigarette he spat into the embers, while the other man, a young fellow as plump as a female baker, sank his towsled head upon his breast as soon as he sat down, and fell asleep.

Next, the clamour across the rivulet subsided for awhile. But suddenly I heard the ex-soldier exclaim in drunken, singsong accents which came from the very centre of the tumult:

“Hi, do you answer me! How comes it that you have no respect for Russia? Is not Riazan a part of Russia? What is Russia, then, I should like to know? “

“A tavern,” the foreman commented quietly; whereafter, turning to me, he added more loudly:

“I say this of such fellows– that a tavern… But what a noise those roisterers are making, to be sure!”

The young fellow in the red shirt had just shouted:

“Hi, there, soldier! Seize him by the throat! Seize him, seize him!”

While from Silantiev had come the gruff retort:

“What? Do you suppose that you are hunting a pack of hounds?”

“Here, answer me!” was the next shouted utterance–it came from the ex-soldier– whereupon the old man remarked to me in an undertone: