"Ah! poor motherless lad. There! there!"
Beaming with happiness, Ilya set to at his usual evening's task, the distribution of the treasures he had collected in the day. The children had been waiting for him for ever so long. They sat in a circle on the ground about him and gazed with greedy eyes at the dirty sack. Ilya fetched out of the bag a couple of strips of calico, a wooden soldier, bleached by wind and weather, a blacking pot, a pomade box, and a teacup with a broken rim and no handle:
"That is for me!—for me—for me!" came the children's voices, and from all sides little dirty hands caught at the rare treasures.
"Wait! Wait! No grabbing!" commanded Ilya. "Do you call that playing fair if you all snatch at once? Now then, I'll open the shop. First, I'll sell this piece of calico, quite wonderful calico, the price is half a rouble. Mashka, buy it!"
"It's bought," shouted Jakov instead of the cobbler's daughter, and drew out of his pocket a potsherd he had held in readiness and pressed it into the merchant's hand. But Ilya would not take it. "What sort of a game's that? You must bargain—my goodness! You never bargain. In the market you must bargain!"
"I forgot," Jakov excused himself, and now began an obstinate haggling. Seller and buyers grew wildly excited, and while they chaffered, Pashka quickly snatched what he wanted out of the heap, and ran off, dancing and shouting in mockery:
"Ha! ha! I've got it! I've got it! You sleepyheads, you silly duffers!"
At first Pashka's thievish ways enraged all the children. The little ones cried and howled, while Jakov and Ilya chased the robber, but usually without success. By degrees they became accustomed to his knavery, looked for nothing better from him and paid him out by refusing angrily to play with him. Pashka lived for himself, and thought of nothing but how to play his evil tricks. The big-headed Jakov, on the other hand, was a kind of nursemaid for the curly-haired daughter of the cobbler. She took his care for her interest as something quite natural, and if she called him always coaxingly "Jashetschka," she also scratched and struck him fairly often. Jakov's friendship with Ilya grew from day to day and he was always telling his friend his most wonderful dreams.
"I dreamed last night that I had a heap of money—bright roubles, a whole sackful, and I carried the sack into the wood on my back. Then all at once some robbers came at me with knives—horrible! I ran away, of course, and then in a minute the sack seemed alive. I threw it away and—you'll never guess—all sorts of birds flew out of it. Whirr! Whirr! Siskins and tits and finches, oh such a tremendous lot! They lifted me up and carried me through the air—high, ever so high."
He broke off and looked at Ilya with his prominent eyes, while a sheepish look came into his face.