"No; do you move away, mates, for I shall best help myself. Never you mind."
And, sure enough, he did succeed in drawing himself out on to the ice without assistance. Whereafter he remarked as he shook himself:
"A nice pickle, this, to be in! I might as well have been drowned!"
And, in fact, at the moment he looked, with his chattering teeth and great tongue licking a dripping moustache, precisely like a large, good-natured dog.
Then I remembered how, a month earlier, he had accidentally driven the blade of his axe through the joint of his left thumb, and, merely picking up the white fragment of flesh with the nail turning blue, and scanning it with his unfathomable eyes, had remarked, as though it was he himself that had been at fault:
"How often before I have injured that thumb, I could not say. And when once I dislocated it, I went on working with it longer than was right.... Now I will go and bury it."
With which, carefully wrapping up the fragment in some shavings, he had thrust the whole into his pocket, and bandaged the wounded hand.
Similarly, after that, did Boev, the man next in order behind Mokei, contrive to wrest himself from the grasp of the ice, though, on immersion, he started bawling, "Mates, I shall drown! I am dead already! Help me, help me!" and became so cramped with terror as to be extricated only with great difficulty, while amid the general confusion the Morduine too nearly slipped into the water.
"A narrow shave of saying Vespers tonight with the devils in Hell!" he remarked as he clambered back, and stood grinning with an even more angular and attenuated appearance than usual.
The next moment Boev achieved a second plunge, and screamed, as before, for help.