Why did you push yourself in there by daylight? You ass! Well, why
haven't you taken one?"

"Oh, I took one all right," said Tikhon.

"Where is he?"

"You see, I took him first thing at dawn," Tikhon continued, spreading
out his flat feet with outturned toes in their bast shoes. "I took him
into the forest. Then I see he's no good and think I'll go and fetch a
likelier one."

"You see?... What a wogue--it's just as I thought," said Denisov to the
esaul. "Why didn't you bwing that one?"

"What was the good of bringing him?" Tikhon interrupted hastily and
angrily--"that one wouldn't have done for you. As if I don't know what
sort you want!"

"What a bwute you are!... Well?"

"I went for another one," Tikhon continued, "and I crept like this
through the wood and lay down." (He suddenly lay down on his stomach
with a supple movement to show how he had done it.) "One turned up and
I grabbed him, like this." (He jumped up quickly and lightly.) "'Come
along to the colonel,' I said. He starts yelling, and suddenly there
were four of them. They rushed at me with their little swords. So I went
for them with my ax, this way: 'What are you up to?' says I. 'Christ
be with you!'" shouted Tikhon, waving his arms with an angry scowl and
throwing out his chest.

"Yes, we saw from the hill how you took to your heels through the
puddles!" said the esaul, screwing up his glittering eyes.

Petya badly wanted to laugh, but noticed that they all refrained from
laughing. He turned his eyes rapidly from Tikhon's face to the esaul's
and Denisov's, unable to make out what it all meant.

"Don't play the fool!" said Denisov, coughing angrily. "Why didn't you
bwing the first one?"

Tikhon scratched his back with one hand and his head with the other,
then suddenly his whole face expanded into a beaming, foolish grin,
disclosing a gap where he had lost a tooth (that was why he was called
Shcherbaty--the gap-toothed). Denisov smiled, and Petya burst into a
peal of merry laughter in which Tikhon himself joined.

"Oh, but he was a regular good-for-nothing," said Tikhon. "The clothes
on him--poor stuff! How could I bring him? And so rude, your honor! Why,
he says: 'I'm a general's son myself, I won't go!' he says."

"You are a bwute!" said Denisov. "I wanted to question..."

"But I questioned him," said Tikhon. "He said he didn't know much.
'There are a lot of us,' he says, 'but all poor stuff--only soldiers
in name,' he says. 'Shout lou