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I will walk first, and next there must come well, which is the heaviest? you, soldier, and then Mokei, and then the Morduine, and then Boev, and then Mishuk, and then Sashok, and then Makarei, the lightest of all. And do you all take off your caps before starting, and say a prayer to the Mother of God. Ha! Here is Old Father Sun coming out to greet us."
Presently work again underwent an interruption through the fact that Yakov Boev, a man who possessed both a stammer and a squint, became similarly filled with a desire to tell us something about a fish.
"A narrow shave of saying Vespers tonight with the devils in Hell!" he remarked as he clambered back, and stood grinning with an even more angular and attenuated appearance than usual. The next moment Boev achieved a second plunge, and screamed, as before, for help. "Don't shout, you goat of a Yashka!" Ossip exclaimed as he threatened him with the spirit-level. "Why scare people? I'll give it you!
And everywhere around me I could discern the chilly, gaping smile of blue crevices which caught at my feet, and rendered the tread of my boot-soles unstable. And ever, as we marched, could the voices of Boev and the old soldier be heard speaking in antiphony, like two pipes being fluted by one and the same pair of lips. "I won't be responsible," said the one voice. "Nor I," responded the other.
Wet, and chilled to the bone, though relieved in spirit, we stepped ashore to find a crowd of townspeople in conversation with Boev and the old soldier. And as we deposited our charge under the lea of a pile of logs he shouted cheerfully: "Mates, Makarei's notebook is done for, soaked through!"
Similarly, after that, did Boev, the man next in order behind Mokei, contrive to wrest himself from the grasp of the ice, though, on immersion, he started bawling, "Mates, I shall drown! I am dead already! Help me, help me!" and became so cramped with terror as to be extricated only with great difficulty, while amid the general confusion the Morduine too nearly slipped into the water.
Ossip followed the police with derisive eyes; whereafter, he leapt to his feet with a nimble, adroit movement, and crossed himself with punctilious piety. "That's all about it, thank God!" he exclaimed. "What?" sniggered Boev, now both disillusioned and astonished. "Do you really mean to say that that leg of yours is better already? Or do you mean that it never was injured at all?" "Ah!
Yet how is it that we were not all drowned? Well, you wouldn't understand even if I were to tell you. No, by God, you wouldn't!... Don't be angry with me, mates. Pardon me for the festival's sake, for I am feeling uneasy of mind. Yes, I it was that egged you on to cross the river, the old fool that I was!" "Aha!" exclaimed Boev. "But, had I been drowned, what should you have said THEN?"
Upon which all crowded together, and Boev, thrusting the tools into a hole in the bank, groaned: "The order 'go' has been given, so go we MUST, well though a man in receipt of such an order might ask himself, 'How is it going to be done?"
Once upon a time Christ Himself, Our Little Father, died." "And rose again," muttered the Morduine with a tinge of resentment. Which led Boev to exclaim: "Puppy, hold your tongue! What right have you to air your opinions?" "Besides, this is Good Friday, not Easter Day," the old soldier concluded with severe, didactical mien.
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