“Don’t play the fool!” said Denísov, coughing angrily. “Why didn’t you bwing the first one?”
Tíkhon scratched his back with one hand and his head with the other, then suddenly his whole face expanded into a beaming, foolish grin, disclosing a gap where he had lost a tooth (that was why he was called Shcherbáty—the gap-toothed). Denísov smiled, and Pétya burst into a peal of merry laughter in which Tíkhon himself joined.
“Oh, but he was a regular good-for-nothing,” said Tíkhon. “The clothes on him—poor stuff! How could I bring him? And so rude, your honor! Why, he says: ‘I’m a general’s son myself, I won’t go!’ he says.”
“You are a bwute!” said Denísov. “I wanted to question...”
“But I questioned him,” said Tíkhon. “He said he didn’t know much. ‘There are a lot of us,’ he says, ‘but all poor stuff—only soldiers in name,’ he says. ‘Shout loud at them,’ he says, ‘and you’ll take them all,’” Tíkhon concluded, looking cheerfully and resolutely into Denísov’s eyes.
“I’ll give you a hundwed sharp lashes—that’ll teach you to play the fool!” said Denísov severely.
“But why are you angry?” remonstrated Tíkhon, “just as if I’d never seen your Frenchmen! Only wait till it gets dark and I’ll fetch you any of them you want—three if you like.”
“Well, let’s go,” said Denísov, and rode all the way to the watchhouse in silence and frowning angrily.
Tíkhon followed behind and Pétya heard the Cossacks laughing with him and at him, about some pair of boots he had thrown into the bushes.
When the fit of laughter that had seized him at Tíkhon’s words and smile had passed and Pétya realized for a moment that this Tíkhon had killed a man, he felt uneasy. He looked round at the captive drummer boy and felt a pang in his heart. But this uneasiness lasted only a moment. He felt it necessary to hold his head higher, to brace himself, and to question the esaul with an air of importance about tomorrow’s undertaking, that he might not be unworthy of the company in which he found himself.