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When at last he arrived in the neighborhood of the churchyard, Simplex blew his trumpet with all his might, and at the shrill sound two stout lads leaped up out of the cemetery ditch, leading after them a horse saddled and bridled. "Valentine!" cried Simplex, "ecce tuum Bucephalum!" Then the man forming the hinder part of the carnival steed sprang quickly forth from beneath the horsecloth.
A board was found, fixed on two saddles and covered with a horsecloth, a small samovar was produced and a cellaret and half a bottle of rum, and having asked Mary Hendrikhovna to preside, they all crowded round her.
Tchertop-hanov gave him a kick, saying, 'Get up, you brute! Then he unhooked a halter from a nail, took off the horsecloth and flung it on the ground, and roughly turning the submissive horse round in the box, led it out into the courtyard, and from the yard into the open country, to the great amazement of the watchman, who could not make out at all where the master was going off to by night, leading an unharnessed horse.
The second race was apparently going on, for just as he went into the sheds he heard a bell ringing. Going towards the stable, he met the white-legged chestnut, Mahotin's Gladiator, being led to the race-course in a blue forage horsecloth, with what looked like huge ears edged with blue. "Where's Cord?" he asked the stable-boy. "In the stable, putting on the saddle."
In a damp, dark back-room, on a wretched bedstead covered with a horsecloth, with a rough felt cloak for a pillow, lay Tchertop-hanov. He was not pale now, but yellowish green, like a corpse, with sunken eyes under leaden lids and a sharp, pinched nose still reddish above his dishevelled whiskers.
In the first cabin he entered he found six famished, ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, huddled in a corner on a little filthy straw, their sole covering being what seemed a piece of ragged horsecloth; their miserable shriveled limbs were hanging about as if they did not belong to their bodies.
He then discoursed to some of his own companions regarding the merits of the horses; and the parson, a learned man, explained to the villagers, that one of the travellers must be a count, or at least had a count's horsecloth; pronounced that the stirrups were of real silver, and checked the impetuosity of his son, William Nassau Dobbs, who was for mounting the animals, and who expressed a longing to fire off one of the pistols in the holsters.
Now just at that time there was no such apprentice in all the guilds of Kassa, so that there was absolutely no one to take up this unpleasant rôle but the poor, good-natured Turk Ali, who could be persuaded to do anything, and everyone could see his red slippers peeping out from under the horsecloth as the carnival steed pranced along.
And the body lay where it had been slain till the following day; but then a good man who grieved for the death of his Lord took it up, and laid it upon the cords of a bed, and covered it with an old horsecloth, and carried it out of the town, and made a grave for it in a place where camels were wont to lie, and buried it there, without gravecloaths and without any honours whatsoever, as if the corpse had been the corpse of a villain.
At last I took off my frozen shoes, and tucked my feet under me on the pack-saddle; then I rubbed them as hard as I could. I was tempted at last to take the horsecloth off my shoulders, and to wrap my feet up in it, but all was of no use. They appeared to me to be frozen, while my whole body seemed changing into ice. At last I had scarcely strength to move either my hands or feet.
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