He stopped his horse, raised his head, and saw his correspondent, the deacon. With a brown, three-cornered hat on his brown hair, which was plaited in a pig-tail, attired in a yellowish nankin long coat, girt much below the waist by a strip of blue stuff, the servant of the altar had come out into his back-garden, and, catching sight of Panteley Eremyitch, he thought it his duty to pay his respects to him, and to take the opportunity of doing so to ask him a question about something. Without some such hidden motive, as we know, ecclesiastical persons do not venture to address temporal ones.
But Tchertop-hanov was in no mood for the deacon; he barely responded to his bow, and, muttering something between his teeth, he was already cracking his whip, when....
'What a magnificent horse you have!' the deacon made haste to add: 'and really you can take credit to yourself for it. Truly you're a man of amazing cleverness, simply a lion indeed!'
His reverence the deacon prided himself on his fluency, which was a great source of vexation to his reverence the priest, to whom the gift of words had not been vouchsafed; even vodka did not loosen his tongue.
'After losing one animal by the cunning of evil men,' continued the deacon, 'you did not lose courage in repining; but, on the other hand, trusting the more confidently in Divine Providence, procured yourself another, in no wise inferior, but even, one may say, superior, since....'
'What nonsense are you talking?' Tchertop-hanov interrupted gloomily; 'what other horse do you mean? This is the same one; this is Malek-Adel.... I found him. The fellow's raving!'....
'Ay! ay! ay!' responded the deacon emphatically with a sort of drawl, drumming with his fingers in his beard, and eyeing Tchertop-hanov with his bright eager eyes: 'How's that, sir? Your horse, God help my memory, was stolen a fortnight before Intercession last year, and now we're near the end of November.'
'Well, what of that?'
The deacon still fingered his beard.
'Why, it follows that more than a year's gone by since then, and your horse was a dapple grey then, just as it is now; in fact, it seems even darker. How's that? Grey horses get a great deal lighter in colour in a year.'