He raised himself, happy at having been recognized after all. But the next moment he knitted his brows in complete disappointment. It was Mihály the humpback.
There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county, whose hand John Bogdán would not at that moment have grasped cordially in a surge of gratitude. But this humpback—he never had wanted to have anything to do with him, and now certainly not. The fellow might imagine he had found a comrade, and was probably glad that he was no longer the only disfigured person in the place.
"Yes, it's I. Well?"
The humpback's small, piercing eyes searched Bogdán's scarred face curiously, and he shook his head in pity.
"Well, well, the Russians certainly have done you up."
Bogdán snarled at him like a vicious cur.
"It's none of your business. What right have you to talk? If I had come into the world like you, with my belly on my back, the Russians couldn't have done anything to me."
The humpback seated himself quietly beside John without showing the least sign of being insulted.
"The war hasn't made you any politer, I can see that," he remarked drily. "You're not exactly in a happy frame of mind, which does not surprise me. Yes, that's the way it is. The poor people must give up their sound flesh and bone so that the enemy should not deprive the rich of their superfluity. You may bless your stars you came out of it as well as you did."
"I do," Bogdán growled with a glance of hatred. "The shells don't ask if you are rich or poor. Counts and barons are lying out there, rotting in the sun like dead beasts. Any man that God has not smitten in his cradle so that he's not fit to be either a man or a woman is out in the battlefield now, whether he's as poor as a church mouse or used to eating from golden plates."