It was on the tip of my tongue to offer him a bribe, when it occurred to me that my money must have gone with my weapons, and as I rode between the two ruffians, I tried to feel, by raising my bound hands to my bosom, and to my surprise the bag was there and felt as weighty as ever. This perplexed me until a sudden thought solved the mystery. Martemian was master of the situation and Martemian intended to have all the gold. He had not searched further than my pockets with Mikhail, because he meant to keep the spoil, and later I found this surmise to be correct and it gave me a clew to a solution of my trouble, and set me to plotting and planning as we jogged along the long straight road, due north from Troïtsa. As we travelled I heard far off, and fainter and fainter, the sweet call of the bells to prayer—to prayer—but I never felt less like praying; I was in a perfect tempest of passion and baffled rage, the captive of two ruffians and as helpless as a clown—with my hands tied.
And yet it was May, and the breath of the northern spring was in the air. The afterglow softened the wide sweep of the steppe, shadows lay here and there, before us grew some trees. There was a sublimity in the solitude of the scene, wide stretching as the sky above us, and tipped at the western edge with crimson.
Before me rode Mikhail, and as he rode he sang a Slavic love song:
“‘Little did I, the young one, slumber at night,
Little did I slumber, but much did I see in sleep.
Just as if in the middle of our court-yard there grew a cypress-tree,
And another sugar-sweet tree;
And on the tree were golden boughs,
Golden boughs and boughs of silver,’”
sang the soldier, at the top of his trumpet voice: