'd have hung all your Russian doctors long ago.
Cutting is all they know! There's our Cossack Baklashka, no longer a
real man now that they've cut off his leg! That shows they're fools.
What's Baklashka good for now? No, my lad, in the mountains there are
real doctors. There was my chum, Vorchik, he was on an expedition and
was wounded just here in the chest. Well, your doctors gave him up, but
one of theirs came from the mountains and cured him! They understand
herbs, my lad!'

'Come, stop talking rubbish,' said Olenin. 'I'd better send a doctor
from head-quarters.'

'Rubbish!' the old man said mockingly. 'Fool, fool! Rubbish. You'll
send a doctor!--If yours cured people, Cossacks and Chechens would go
to you for treatment, but as it is your officers and colonels send to
the mountains for doctors. Yours are all humbugs, all humbugs.'

Olenin did not answer. He agreed only too fully that all was humbug in
the world in which he had lived and to which he was now returning.

'How is Lukashka? You've been to see him?' he asked.

'He just lies as if he were dead. He does not eat nor drink. Vodka is
the only thing his soul accepts. But as long as he drinks vodka it's
well. I'd be sorry to lose the lad. A fine lad--a brave, like me. I too
lay dying like that once. The old women were already wailing. My head
was burning. They had already laid me out under the holy icons. So I
lay there, and above me on the oven little drummers, no bigger than
this, beat the tattoo. I shout at them and they drum all the harder.'
(The old man laughed.) 'The women brought our church elder. They were
getting ready to bury me. They said, "He defiled himself with worldly
unbelievers; he made merry with women; he ruined people; he did not
fast, and he played the balalayka. Confess," they said. So I began to
confess. "I've sinned!" I said. Whatever the priest said, I always
answered "I've sinned." He began to ask me about the balalayka. "Where
is the accursed thing," he says. "Show it me and smash it." But I say,
"I've not got it." I'd hidden it myself in a net in the outhouse. I
knew they could not find it. So they left me. Yet after all I
recovered. When I went for my BALALAYKA--What was I saying?' he
continued. 'Listen to me, and keep farther away from the other men or
you'll get killed foolishly. I feel for you, truly: you are a
drinker--I love you! And fellows like you like riding up the mounds.
There was one who lived here who had come from