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Updated: June 22, 2025
"In that case there is no need for you to wait here; you can set off at once. I'll dispatch you immediately. Excellent!" He salutes Malahin and runs off to his room, reading forms as he goes. The old man is very much pleased by the conversation that has just taken place; he smiles and looks about the room as though looking for something else agreeable.
He takes them very calmly, too, and looking good-naturedly at the old man enters into conversation. "You are going to sell your cattle, I suppose.... It's good business!" Malahin sighs and, looking calmly at the oiler's black face, tells him that trading in cattle used certainly to be profitable, but now it has become a risky and losing business. "I have a mate here," the oiler interrupts him.
Sometimes he runs across the street and looks into the grocer's shop, admires the jars of cakes of different colors, yawns, and lazily saunters back to his room. The city does not interest him. At last the bullocks are sold to a dealer. Malahin hires drovers. The cattle are divided into herds, ten in each, and driven to the other end of the town.
"You merchant gentlemen might make him a little present...." Malahin gives something to the mate too. The troop train goes quickly and the waits at the stations are comparatively short. The old man is pleased.
He ends his protocol thus: "The above deposition I, non-commissioned officer Tchered, have written down in this protocol with a view to present it to the head of the Z. section, and have handed a copy thereof to Gavril Malahin." The old man takes the copy, adds it to the papers with which his side pocket is stuffed, and, much pleased, goes back to his van.
"Yes, my lad," Malahin goes on, as he feels Yasha lie down beside him and the young man's huge back huddle against his own, "it's cold. There is a draught from every crack. If your mother or your sister were to sleep here for one night they would be dead by morning. There it is, my lad, you wouldn't study and go to the high school like your brothers, so you must take the cattle with your father.
Having got through the unloading and veterinary inspection, Malahin and Yasha take up their quarters in a dirty, cheap hotel in the outskirts of the town, in the square in which the cattle-market is held.
The scowling face of Malahin grows a little brighter over the tea. "We know how to eat and drink, but we don't remember our work. Yesterday we could do nothing all day but eat and drink, and I'll be bound we forgot to put down what we spent. What a memory! Lord have mercy on us!"
Getting out of the van, Malahin does not recognize his train. His eight vans of bullocks are standing in the same row with some trolleys which were not a part of the train before. Two or three of these are loaded with rubble and the others are empty. The guards running to and fro on the platform are strangers. They give unwilling and indistinct answers to his questions.
Seeing Malahin, the guard sighs guiltily and throws up his hands. "We can't go number fourteen," he says. "We are very much behind time. Another train has gone with that number." The station-master rapidly looks through some forms, then turns his beaming blue eyes upon Malahin, and, his face radiant with smiles and freshness, showers questions on him: "You are Mr. Malahin? You have the cattle?
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