“And if he is drowned?”
“Well, what then? On Sunday you won’t have a new ribbon to go to church in.”
An interval of silence followed. One thing, however, struck me—in talking to me the blind boy spoke in the Little Russian dialect, but now he was expressing himself in pure Russian.
“You see, I am right!” the blind boy went on, clapping his hands. “Yanko is not afraid of sea, nor winds, nor mist, nor coastguards! Just listen! That is not the water plashing, you can’t deceive me—it is his long oars.”
The woman sprang up and began anxiously to gaze into the distance.
“You are raving!” she said. “I cannot see anything.”
I confess that, much as I tried to make out in the distance something resembling a boat, my efforts were unsuccessful. About ten minutes passed thus, when a black speck appeared between the mountains of the waves! At one time it grew larger, at another smaller. Slowly rising upon the crests of the waves and swiftly descending from them, the boat drew near to the shore.
“He must be a brave sailor,” I thought, “to have determined to cross the twenty versts of strait on a night like this, and he must have had a weighty reason for doing so.”
Reflecting thus, I gazed with an involuntary beating of the heart at the poor boat. It dived like a duck, and then, with rapidly swinging oars—like wings—it sprang forth from the abyss amid the splashes of the foam. “Ah!” I thought, “it will be dashed against the shore with all its force and broken to pieces!” But it turned aside adroitly and leaped unharmed into a little creek. Out of it stepped a man of medium height, wearing a Tartar sheepskin cap. He waved his hand, and all three set to work to drag something out of the boat. The cargo was so large that, to this day, I cannot understand how it was that the boat did not sink.
Each of them shouldered a bundle, and they set off along the shore, and I soon lost sight of them. I had to return home; but I confess I was rendered uneasy by all these strange happenings, and I found it hard to await the morning.