“You are chasing ghosts,” grumbled Ilya, crossing himself at mention of a dead man. “That man is dead. Or is it that you are looking for souls for the devil?”
“Dead!” exclaimed Rimsky. “Now that is a pity. I came to get a drinking friend, but now I shall have to go and have a glass of vodka by myself in his memory. He owed me two rubles but he was a good man, I can say that for him.”
“Better than I can say for you,” Ilya called out into the dark yard after Rimsky, who had retreated abruptly from the hall. “He never drank his vodka alone, for one thing, like others I know, and they not far off. He was civil to his friends, I can say that—and when you are dead you had better take care that folks say the same of you.”
“Then you didn’t learn your manners from him,” retorted Rimsky, stopping in the court. “You swing your tongue too much for an honest man—or to have it wet with vodka. When I drink I wish to be merry.”
“You are an old wolf with the fleas!” called Ilya.
Rimsky laughed at him.
“May you die blind!” bawled Ilya.
“Oh, come and warm your belly with a sup of vodka,” said Rimsky, “unless you think that if you turned good-natured you would come down with a distemper.”
Ilya ran after him and the pair walked down to the little restaurant kept by a one-eared gypsy from Bessarabia where in the old days the thieves gathered to dispose of their loot to Chinese.
There were but a few people inside the place. A Buriat, who had probably sold some cattle, was lying across a table in a drunken stupor, his purple conical cap on the floor under his feet. A crippled beggar was drinking soup from a bowl with a wooden ladle, and a Chinese peddler of charms was gambling in a corner with a Mongol holy man.