" Enough of that, brother! Don't think of such a thing! I won't let you go! " replied Kalugin. " Your turn will come, brother! "
** Seriously t So you think that it is not necessary to go t Hey.!*..."
At that moment, a frightful crash of rifles was heard in the direction in which these gentlemen were looking, above the roar of the cannon, and thousands of small fires, flaring up incessantly, without intermission, flashed along the entire line.
" That's it, when the real work has begun! " said Kalugin. — *' That is the sound of the rifles, and I cannot hear it in cold blood; it takes a sort of hold on your soul, you know. And there is the hurrah! " he added, listening to the prolonged and distant roar of hundreds of voices, " A-a-aa!" which reached him from the bastion. *' What is this hurrah, theirs or ours?" *'I don't know; but it has come to a hand-tohand fight, for the firing has ceased."
At that moment, an officer followed by his Cossack galloped up to the porch, and slipped down from his horse. " Where from.? "
" From the bastion. The general is wanted." " Let us go. Well, now, what is it } " "They have attacked the lodgements... have taken them... the French have brought up their heavy reserves... they have attacked our forces... there were only two battalions," said the panting officer, who was the same that had come in the evening, drawing his breath with difficulty, but stepping to the door with perfect unconcern.
"Well, have they retreated.?" inquired Gaitsin.
"No," answered the officer, angrily. "The battalion came up and beat them back; but the commander of the regiment is killed, and many officers, and I have been ordered to ask for reenforcements...."
And with these words he and Kalugin went off to the general, whither we will not follow them.
Five minutes later, Kalugin was mounted on the Cossack's horse (and with that peculiar, quasi- Cossack seat, in which, as I have observed, all adjutants find something especially captivating, for some reason or other), and rode at a trot to the bastion, in order to give some orders, and to await the news of the final result of the affair. And Prince Galtsin, under the influence of that oppressive emotion which the signs of a battle near at hand usually produce on a spectator who takes no part in it, went out into the street, and began to pace up and down there without any object.
VI.
The soldiers were bearing the wounded on stretchers, and supporting them by their arms. It was completely dark in the streets; now and then, a rare light flashed in the hospital or from the spot where the officers were seated. The same thunder of cannon and exchange of rifleshots was borne from the bastions, and the same fires flashed against the dark heavens. Now and then, you could hear the trampling hoofs of an orderly's horse, the groan of a wounded man, the footsteps and voices of the stretcher-bearers, or the conversation of some of the frightened female inhabitants, who had come out on their porches to view the cannonade.
Among the latter were our acquaintances Nikita, the old sailor's widow, with whom he had already made his peace, and her ten-year-old daughter. "Lord, Most Holy Mother of God!" whispered the old woman to herself with a sigh, as she watched the bombs, which, like balls of fire, sailed incessantly from one side to the other. " What a shame, what a shame! I-i-hi-hi! It was not so in the first bombardment. See, there it has burst, the cursed thing! right above our house in the suburbs.'*
" No, it is farther off, in aunt Arinka's garden, that they all fall," said the little girl.
" And where, where is my master now! " said Nikita, with a drawl, for he was still rather drunk. •* Oh, how I love that master of mine! — I don't know myself! — I love him so that if, which God forbid, they should kill him in this sinful fight, then, if you will believe it, aunty, I don't know myself what I might do to myself in that case — by Heavens, I don't! He is such a master that words will not do him justice! Would I exchange him for one of those who play cards } That is simply — whew! that's all there is to say! " concluded Nikita, pointing at the lighted window of his master's room, in which, as the staff-captain was absent, Yunker Zhvadchevsky had invited his friends to a carouse, on the occasion of his receiving the cross: Sub-Lieutenant Ugrovitch and Sub-Lieutenant Nepshisetsky, who was ill with a cold in the head.
N MAY,