hands, and muttered:

"Yes, it IS true. If it please you, it was I that contrived the idea."

"Of COURSE it was!" the old soldier cried triumphantly.

Ossip turned his eyes again to where the river was seething like a bowl
of porridge, and, letting his eyes fall with a frown, continued:

"In a moment of forgetfulness I did it. 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?"

In fact, by this time Ossip seemed conscious to the full of the
futility and the senselessness of what he had done: and in his state of
sliminess, as he sat nodding his head, picking at the sand, looking at
no one, and emitting a torrent of remorseful words, he reminded me
strongly of a new-born calf.

And as I watched him I thought to myself:

"Where now is the leader of men who could draw his fellows in his train
with so much care and skill and authority?"

And into my soul there trickled an uneasy sense of something lacking.
Seating myself beside Ossip (for I desired still to retain a measure of
my late impression of him), I said to him in an undertone:

"Soon you will be all right again."

With a sideways glance he muttered in reply, as he combed his beard:

"Well, you saw what happened just now. Always do things so happen."

While for the benefit of the men he added:

"That was a good jest of mine, eh?"

The summit of the hill which lay crouching, like a great beast, on the
brink of the river was standing out clearly against the fast darkening
sky; while a clump of trees thereon had grown black, and everywhere
blue shadows of the spring eventide were coming into view, and looming
between the housetops where the houses lay pressed like scabs against
the hill's opaque surface, and peering from the moist, red jaws of the
ravine which, gaping towards the river, seemed as though it were
stretching forth for a draught of water.

Also, by now the rustling and crunching of the ice on the similarly
darkening river was beginning to assume a deeper note, and at times a
floe would thrust one of its extremities into the bank as a pig thrusts
its snout into the earth, and there remain motionless before