"Ah! you're a meteor!" said the captain.
"Let me knock some of his teeth out," proposed Martianoff.
"But why?" asked the lad.
"Because"—
"Well, then, I should take a stone and knock you on the head," replied the boy respectfully.
Martianoff would have thrashed him if Kouvalda had not interfered. "Leave him alone; he is distantly related to you, brother, as he is to all of us. You, without sufficient reason, want to knock his teeth out; and he, also without sufficient reason, wants to live with us. Well, damn it all! We all have to live without sufficient reason for doing so. We live, but ask us why; we can't say. Well, it's so with him, so let him be."
"But still, young man, you had better leave us," the schoolmaster intervened, surveying the lad with sad eyes.
The lad did not answer, but remained. At last they grew accustomed to him, and paid no attention to him, but he watched closely all that they said and did.
All the above-mentioned individuals formed the captain's bodyguard, and with good-natured irony he used to call them his "Outcasts." Besides these, there were five or six tramp rank-and-file in the doss-house; these were country-folk who could not boast of such antecedents as the outcasts, though they had undergone no less vicissitudes of fate; but they were a degree less degraded, and not so completely broken down. It may be that a decent man from the educated classes in town is somewhat above a decent peasant; but it is inevitable that a vicious townsman should be immeasurably more degraded in mind than a criminal from the country. This rule was strikingly illustrated by the inhabitants of Kouvalda's dwelling.
The most prominent peasant representative was a rag-picker of the name of Tiapa. Tall, and horribly thin, he constantly carried his head so that his chin fell on his breast, and from this position his shadow always assumed the shape of a hook.