“Thanks, your excellency,” said the vagrant, “and may heaven reward you.  As long as I live I shall never forget your kindness.”

I soon forgot the snowstorm, the guide, and my hare-skin touloup, and on arrival at Orenburg hasted to wait on the general, an old comrade-in-arms of my father’s.  The general received me kindly, examined my commission, told me there was nothing for me to do in Orenburg, and sent me on to Fort Belogorsk to serve under Commander Mironoff.  Belogorsk lay about thirty miles beyond Orenburg, on the frontier of the Kirghiz Kaisak Steppes, and it was to this outlandish place I was banished.

I expected to see high bastions, a wall and a ditch, but there was nothing at Belogorsk but a little village, surrounded by a wooden palisade.  An old iron cannon was near the gateway, the streets were narrow and crooked, and the commandant’s house to which I had been driven was a wooden erection.

Vassilissa Ignorofna, the commandant’s wife, received me with simple kindness, and treated me at once as one of the family.  An old army pensioner and Palashka, the one servant, laid the cloth for dinner; while in the square, near the house, the commandant, a tall and hale old man, wearing a dressing-gown and a cotton nightcap, was busy drilling some twenty elderly men—­all pensioners.

Chvabrine, an officer who had been dismissed from the guards for fighting a duel, and Marya, a young girl of sixteen, with a fresh, round face, the commandant’s daughter, were also at dinner.

Mironoff pleaded in excuse for being late for dinner that he had been busy drilling his little soldiers, but his wife cut him short ruthlessly.

“Nonsense,” she said, “you’re only boasting; they are past service, and you don’t remember much about the drill.  Far better for you to stay at home and say your prayers.”  Vassilissa Ignorofna never seemed to stop talking, and overwhelmed me with questions.

In the course of a few weeks I found that she not only led her husband completely, but also directed all military affairs, and ruled the fort as completely as she did the household.  This really suited Ivan Mironoff very well, for he was a good-hearted, uneducated man, staunch and true, who had been raised from the ranks, and was now grown lazy.  Both husband and wife were excellent people, and I soon became attached to them, and to the daughter Marya, an affectionate and sensible girl.

As for Chvabrine, he at first professed great friendship for me; but being in love with Marya, who detested him, he began to hate me when he saw a growing friendliness between Marya and myself.

I was now an officer, but there was little work for me to do.  There was no drill, no mounting guard, no reviewing of troops.  Sometimes Captain Mironoff tried to drill his soldiers, but he never succeeded in making them know the right hand from the left.

All seemed peace, in spite of my quarrels with Chvabrine.  Every day I was more and more in love with Marya, and the notion that we might be disturbed at Fort Belogorsk by any repetition of the riots and revolts which had taken place in the province of Orenburg the previous year was not entertained.  Danger was nearer than we had imagined.  The Cossacks and half-savage tribes of the frontier were again already in revolt.