nother one whistling in a manner the tossed echoes of which
drowned even the rivulet's murmur as nearer and nearer came the mob of
men, a mob clad variously in black, grey, or russet, with sleeves
rolled up, and heads, in many cases, bare save for their own towsled,
dishevelled locks, and bodies bent with fatigue, or carried stumblingly
along on legs bowed outwards. Meanwhile, as the dull, polyphonous roar
of voices swept through the neck of the defile, a man shouted in
broken, but truculent, accents:

"I say no! Fiddlesticks! Not a man is there who could drink more than a
vedro of 'blood-and-sweat' in a day."

"A man could drink a lake of it."

"No, a vedro and a half. That is the proper reckoning."

"Aye, a vedro and a half." And the ex-soldier, as he repeated the
words, spoke both as though he were an expert in the matter and as
though he felt for the matter a touch of respect. Then, lurching
forward like a man pushed by the scruff of the neck, he crossed the
rivulet, intercepted the crowd, and became swallowed up in its midst.

Around the barraque the carpenters (the foreman ever glimmering among
them) were hurriedly collecting tools. Presently Vasili returned--his
right hand thrust into his pocket, and his left holding his cap.

"Before long those fellows will be properly drunk!" he said with a
frown. "Ah, that vodka of ours! It is a perfect curse!" Then to me: "Do
YOU drink?"

"No," I replied.

"Thank God for that! If one does not drink one will never really get
into trouble."

For a moment he gazed gloomily in the direction of the newcomers. Then
he said without moving, without even looking at me:

"You have remarkable eyes, young fellow. Also, they seem familiar to
me--I have seen them somewhere before. Possibly that happened in a
dream, though I cannot be sure. Where do you come from?"

I answered, but, after scanning me perplexedly, he shook his head.

"No," he remarked. "I have never visited that part of the country, or
indeed, been so far from home."

"But this place is further still?"

"Further still?"

"Yes--from Kursk."

He laughed.

"I must tell you the truth," he said. "I am not a Kurskan at all, but a
Pskovian. The reason why I told the ex-soldier that I was from Kursk
was that I neither liked him nor cared to tell him the whole truth-he
was not worth the trouble. And as for my real name, it is Paul, not
Vasili--Paul Nikolaev Silantiev--and is so marked on my passport (for a
pass