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He saw that beside the black thing they had noticed, dry, oblong willow-leaves were fluttering, and so he knew it was not a forest but a settlement, but he did not wish to say so. And in fact they had not gone twenty-five yards beyond the ditch before something in front of them, evidently trees, showed up black, and they heard a new and melancholy sound. Nikita had guessed right: it was not a wood, but a row of tall willows with a few leaves still fluttering on them here and there. They had evidently been planted along the ditch round a threshing-floor. Coming up to the willows, which moaned sadly in the wind, the horse suddenly planted his forelegs above the height of the sledge, drew up his hind legs also, pulling the sledge onto higher ground, and turned to the left, no longer sinking up to his knees in snow. They were back on a road.

‘Well, here we are, but heaven only knows where!’ said Nikita.

The horse kept straight along the road through the drifted snow, and before they had gone another hundred yards the straight line of the dark wattle wall of a barn showed up black before them, its roof heavily covered with snow which poured down from it. After passing the barn the road turned to the wind and they drove into a snow-drift. But ahead of them was a lane with houses on either side, so evidently the snow had been blown across the road and they had to drive through the drift. And so in fact it was. Having driven through the snow they came out into a street. At the end house of the village some frozen clothes hanging on a line–shirts, one red and one white, trousers, leg-bands, and a petticoat–fluttered wildly in the wind. The white shirt in particular struggled desperately, waving its sleeves about.

‘There now, either a lazy woman or a dead one has not taken her clothes down before the holiday,’ remarked Nikita, looking at the fluttering shirts.

III

At the entrance to the street the wind still raged and the road was thickly covered with snow, but well within the village it was calm, warm, and cheerful. At one house a dog was barking, at another a woman, covering her head with her coat, came running from somewhere and entered the door of a hut, stopping on the threshold to have a look at the passing sledge. In the middle of the village girls could be heard singing.

Here in the village there seemed to be less wind and snow, and the frost was less keen.

‘Why, this is Grishkino,’ said Vasili Andreevich.

‘So it is,’ responded Nikita.

It really was Grishkino, which meant that they had gone too far to the left and had travelled some six miles, not quite in the direction they aimed at, but towards their destination for all that.

From Grishkino to Goryachkin was about another four miles.

In the middle of the village they almost ran into a tall man walking down the middle of the street.

‘Who are you?’ shouted the man, stopping the horse, and recognizing Vasili Anereevich he immediately took hold of the shaft, went along it hand over hand till he reached the sledge, and placed himself on the driver’s seat.

He was Isay, a peasant of Vasili Andreevich’s acquaintance, and well known as the principal horse-thief in the district.

‘Ah, Vasili Andreevich! Where are you off to?’ said Isay, enveloping Nikita in the odour of the vodka he had drunk.

‘We were going to Goryachkin.’

‘And look where you’ve got to! You should have gone through Molchanovka.’

‘Should have, but didn’t manage it,’ said Vasili Andreevich, holding in the horse.

‘That’s a good horse,’ said Isay, with a shrewd glance at Mukhorty, and with a practised hand he tightened the loosened knot high in the horse’s bushy tail.

‘Are you going to stay the night?’

‘No, friend. I must get on.’