led his right hand from
which he had lost the glove, and this was a real desert in which he was
now left alone like that wormwood, awaiting an inevitable, speedy, and
meaningless death.

'Queen of Heaven! Holy Father Nicholas, teacher of temperance!' he
thought, recalling the service of the day before and the holy icon with
its black face and gilt frame, and the tapers which he sold to be set
before that icon and which were almost immediately brought back to him
scarcely burnt at all, and which he put away in the store-chest. He
began to pray to that same Nicholas the Wonder-Worker to save him,
promising him a thanksgiving service and some candles. But he clearly
and indubitably realized that the icon, its frame, the candles,
the priest, and the thanksgiving service, though very important and
necessary in church, could do nothing for him here, and that there was
and could be no connexion between those candles and services and his
present disastrous plight. 'I must not despair,' he thought. 'I must
follow the horse's track before it is snowed under. He will lead me out,
or I may even catch him. Only I must not hurry, or I shall stick fast
and be more lost than ever.'

But in spite of his resolution to go quietly, he rushed forward and
even ran, continually falling, getting up and falling again. The horse's
track was already hardly visible in places where the snow did not lie
deep. 'I am lost!' thought Vasili Andreevich. 'I shall lose the track
and not catch the horse.' But at that moment he saw something black. It
was Mukhorty, and not only Mukhorty, but the sledge with the shafts
and the kerchief. Mukhorty, with the sacking and the breechband twisted
round to one side, was standing not in his former place but nearer to
the shafts, shaking his head which the reins he was stepping on drew
downwards. It turned out that Vasili Andreevich had sunk in the same
ravine Nikita had previously fallen into, and that Mukhorty had been
bringing him back to the sledge and he had got off his back no more than
fifty paces from where the sledge was.

IX

Having stumbled back to the sledge Vasili Andreevich caught hold of it
and for a long time stood motionless, trying to calm himself and recover
his breath. Nikita was not in his former place, but something, already
covered with snow, was lying in the sledge and Vasili Andreevich
concluded that this was Nikita. His terror had now quite left him, and
if he felt any fear it was l