“It’s all very well, to be sure, only you won’t reach those plenteous regions, brother.  How could you?  Before you’d gone two hundred miles you’d give up your soul to God.  Just look what a weakling you are!  Here you’ve hardly gone five miles and you can’t get your breath.”

The tramp turned slowly toward Nikandr, and the blissful smile vanished from his face.  He looked with a scared and guilty air at the peasant’s staid face, apparently remembered something, and bent his head.  A silence followed again....  All three were pondering.  The peasants were racking their brains in the effort to grasp in their imagination what can be grasped by none but God—­that is, the vast expanse dividing them from the land of freedom.  Into the tramp’s mind thronged clear and distinct pictures more terrible than that expanse.  Before him rose vividly the picture of the long legal delays and procrastinations, the temporary and permanent prisons, the convict boats, the wearisome stoppages on the way, the frozen winters, illnesses, deaths of companions....

The tramp blinked guiltily, wiped the tiny drops of sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, drew a deep breath as though he had just leapt out of a very hot bath, then wiped his forehead with the other sleeve and looked round fearfully.

“That’s true; you won’t get there!” Ptaha agreed.  “You are not much of a walker!  Look at you—­nothing but skin and bone!  You’ll die, brother!”

“Of course he’ll die!  What could he do?” said Nikandr.  “He’s fit for the hospital now....  For sure!”

The man who had forgotten his name looked at the stern, unconcerned faces of his sinister companions, and without taking off his cap, hurriedly crossed himself, staring with wide-open eyes....  He trembled, his head shook, and he began twitching all over, like a caterpillar when it is stepped upon....

“Well, it’s time to go,” said Nikandr, getting up; “we’ve had a rest.”

A minute later they were stepping along the muddy road.  The tramp was more bent than ever, and he thrust his hands further up his sleeves.  Ptaha was silent.

THE PIPE

Meliton SHISHKIN, a bailiff from the Dementyev farm, exhausted by the sultry heat of the fir-wood and covered with spiders’ webs and pine-needles, made his way with his gun to the edge of the wood.  His Damka—­a mongrel between a yard dog and a setter—­an extremely thin bitch heavy with young, trailed after her master with her wet tail between her legs, doing all she could to avoid pricking her nose.  It was a dull, overcast morning.  Big drops dripped from the bracken and from the trees that were wrapped in a light mist; there was a pungent smell of decay from the dampness of the wood.

There were birch-trees ahead of him where the wood ended, and between their stems and branches he could see the misty distance.  Beyond the birch-trees someone was playing on a shepherd’s rustic pipe.  The player produced no more than five or six notes, dragged them out languidly with no attempt at forming a tune, and yet there was something harsh and extremely dreary in the sound of the piping.