We gathered that this was the meaning of the elder's remark, but until we had kicked Michail into the realms of consciousness in order to translate it for us we could not be certain. Michail awoke at the seventeenth kick, and said he had not been asleep, but had been lying and thinking. He told us what the elder had said, the elder repeating it.
"Tell him that's our business," said Jack surlily—he was disgusted, like myself, with the failure of our labours; "and that he'd better go home to the village and mind his own."
"Oh," said the elder, on hearing this, "certainly I will obey; I had no wish to intrude upon their Mercifulnesses; only I thought their Mercifulnesses might be digging here in order to find a certain tin box with a letter in it which I myself found near this spot some years ago!"
The spade dropped from my hand; Jack's fell also.
"Michail," he said, or gasped; "what does the fellow mean? Where is the tin box and the letter that he found here? Ask him quickly, idiot, or I'll brain you with my spade!"
The elder was not disturbed by our excitement; he said he thought the tin box was somewhere up at the village; he wasn't quite sure!
CHAPTER XXX
I TAKE A STRONG LEAD IN THE RACE
Jack seized the elder by the shoulders and shook him—shook him handsomely and thoroughly till his splendid white moujik-teeth rattled in his head. The elder burst into tears and fell on his knees as soon as Jack let go of him, crossing himself repeatedly and jabbering vociferously. The fox had changed in an instant into a rabbit, and a timid one at that. It was impossible to translate what he said, Michail protested. On being pressed to do so, Michail observed—
"He say his prayers," and I think that must have been about the measure of it; at all events, he was saying nothing about tin boxes.