It was summer. At daybreak the baggage-train was loaded behind the fort; the convoy came out and started along the road. Jilin was on horseback; his things were on a cart with the baggage-train.
They had about twenty miles to go. The baggage-train moved along slowly; now the soldiers would stop, now a wheel came off a cart, now a horse would refuse to go on, and then everybody had to wait.
It was already past noon and they had not covered half the distance. It was hot, dusty, the sun scorching and no shade at all—bare steppe, with not a tree or a bush the whole way.
Jilin rode on ahead and stopped to wait until the baggage-train should catch him up. He heard the signal-horn sounded; the company had stopped again. Jilin thought, “Why shouldn’t I go on alone without the soldiers? I have a good horse, and if I come across any Tartars I can easily gallop away. I wonder if it would be safe?”
As he stood there thinking it over, another officer, by the name of Kostilin, rode up with a rifle and said, “Let us go on alone, Jilin. I’m dreadfully hungry, and the heat’s unbearable. My shirt is wringing wet.”
Kostilin was a big man and stout; his face was burning red, and the perspiration poured from his brow.
Jilin deliberated for a moment and said, “Is your rifle loaded?”
“It is.”
“Very well; come along. Only the condition is to be that we don’t part.”
And they set off down the road alone. They were riding along the steppe talking together and keeping a sharp look-out from side to side. They could see a long way round them. When they left the steppe they came to a road running down a valley between two hills. And Jilin said, “Let’s go up on that hill and look about; some Tartars might easily spring out from the hills and we shouldn’t see them.”