r two, for their thoughts were fixed upon the town and its
washhouses and churches. And particularly restless was Sashok Diatlov,
a man whose hair, as flaxen as that of his brother, seemed to have been
boiled in lye. At intervals, glancing up-river, this well-built, sturdy
young fellow would say softly to his brother:

"It's cracking now, eh?"

And, certainly, the ice had "moved" two nights ago, so that since
yesterday morning the river watchmen had refused to permit horsed
vehicles to cross, and only a few beadlike pedestrians now were making
their way along the marked-out ice paths, while, as they proceeded, one
could hear the water slapping against the planks as the latter bent
under the travellers' weight.

"Yes, it IS cracking," at length Mishuk replied with a hoist of his
ginger eyebrows.

Ossip too scanned the river from under his hand. Then he said to Mishuk:

"Pah! It is the dry squeak of the planes in your own hand that you keep
hearing, so go on with your work, you son of a beldame. And as for you,
Inspector, do you help me to speed up the men instead of burying your
nose in your notebook."

By this time there remained only two more hours for work, and the arch
of the icebreaker had been wholly sheathed in butter-tinted scantlings,
and nothing required to be added to it save the great iron braces.
Unfortunately, Boev and Saniavin, the men who had been engaged upon the
task of cutting out the sockets for the braces, had worked so amiss,
and run their lines so straight, that, when it came to the point, the
arms of the braces refused to sink properly into the wood.

"Oh, you cock-eyed fool of a Morduine!" shouted Ossip, smiting his fist
against the side of his cap. "Do you call THAT sort of thing work?"

At this juncture there came from somewhere on the bank a seemingly
exultant shout of:

"Ah! NOW it's giving way!"

And almost at the same moment, there stole over the river a sort of
rustle, a sort of quiet crunching which made the projecting pine
branches quiver as though they were trying to catch at something,
while, shouldering their mattocks, the barefooted sailors noisily
hastened aboard their barges with the aid of rope ladders.

And then curious indeed was it to see how many people suddenly came
into view on the river--to see how they appeared to issue from below
the very ice itself, and, hurrying to and fro like jackdaws startled by
the shot of a gun, to dart hither and thither, and to seize