“Now then, tell us where did you steal them, you devil?” shouted Eróshka. “Fine fellow, I’m fond of you!”
“Fond indeed...” answered Lukáshka laughing, “carrying sweets from cadets to lasses! Eh, you old...”
“That’s not true, not true! ... Oh, Mark,” and the old man burst out laughing. “And how that devil begged me. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘and arrange it.’ He offered me a gun! But no. I’d have managed it, but I feel for you. Now tell us where have you been?” And the old man began speaking in Tartar.
Lukáshka answered him promptly.
Ergushóv, who did not know much Tartar, only occasionally put in a word in Russian: “What I say is he’s driven away the horses. I know it for a fact,” he chimed in.
“Giréy and I went together.” (His speaking of Giréy Khan as “Giréy” was, to the Cossack mind, evidence of his boldness.) “Just beyond the river he kept bragging that he knew the whole of the steppe and would lead the way straight, but we rode on and the night was dark, and my Giréy lost his way and began wandering in a circle without getting anywhere: couldn’t find the village, and there we were. We must have gone too much to the right. I believe we wandered about well-nigh till midnight. Then, thank goodness, we heard dogs howling.”
“Fools!” said Daddy Eróshka. “There now, we too used to lose our way in the steppe. (Who the devil can follow it?) But I used to ride up a hillock and start howling like the wolves, like this!” He placed his hands before his mouth, and howled like a pack of wolves, all on one note. “The dogs would answer at once ... Well, go on—so you found them?”
“We soon led them away! Nazárka was nearly caught by some Nogáy women, he was!”
“Caught indeed,” Nazárka, who had just come back, said in an injured tone.
“We rode off again, and again Giréy lost his way and almost landed us among the sand-drifts. We thought we were just getting to the Térek but we were riding away from it all the time!”