Jakov's wife, who lost her reason at the time of the fire, was left in the care of Terenti, and with her, her son Ilya, a boy of ten, sturdy, black-eyed, and serious beyond his years. Whenever the lad appeared in the village streets, the other children ran after him, throwing stones at him, and the bigger ones would shout, "Ah! the young devil the prison brat, bad luck to you!"
Terenti, unfitted for laborious work, dealt up to the time of the fire in tar, needles and thread, and such small wares, but the catastrophe which destroyed half the village made an end both of the Lunevs' house and Terenti's whole stock-in-trade, so that all the Lunevs then possessed in the world amounted to one horse and thirty-three roubles in money.
As soon as Terenti found that his native village would offer him no way whatever to earn a living, he entrusted his sister-in-law to the care of an old peasant woman at fifty kopecks a month, bought a ricketty old cart, and placed his nephew in it, determined to make for the chief town of the district, where he hoped for some assistance from a distant relative, Petrusha Filimonov, a servant in a small tavern.
Secretly and like a thief in the night, Terenti left his home. He guided his horse silently, often looking back with his large dark eyes. The horse trotted on, the cart jolted from side to side and Ilya nestled into the hay, and soon slept the deep sleep of childhood.
In the middle of the night the boy was awakened by a strange terrifying sound, like the howl of a wolf. It was a clear night, the cart was standing at the outskirts of a wood, and the horse moved round it cropping the dewy grass. A great pine tree, its highest branches scorched, stood far apart in the plain, as though driven out from the forest. The boy's eager eyes looked anxiously for his uncle; but through the quiet night from time to time the only distant sound was the dull thud of the horse's hoofs, or the noise of its breathing like heavy sighs, and the same mysterious terrifying sound filled the air, and frightened the lad.
"Uncle?" he called softly.
"What is it?" answered Terenti, at once, and the doleful sound ceased suddenly.
"Where are you?"
"Here. Go to sleep again."
Then Ilya saw his uncle, sitting on a mound at the edge of the wood, like a black tree-stump rising out of the earth.