At this moment a great ferry-boat came near the island. The men who were standing in it had already, at a distance, begun to wave their arms. They were Cossacks and dressed in coats falling to rags. The miserable dress which they wore (some of them had nothing about them but their shirt and a short pipe in their mouth) showed at once that they had recently escaped from misfortune, or that they had been feasting until they had spent all that they had about their persons. From among them came forward, a short, thickset, broad-shouldered Cossack, some fifty years old. He shrieked louder than any, and waved his arms in the most discordant manner. But the cries and the talking of the workmen prevented him from being heard.
"What brings you here?" asked the Koschevoï, while the ferry-boat was landing. All the workmen, stopping in their work with raised axes and other instruments, looked on in expectation.
"Misfortune!" shouted the thickset Cossack from the ferry-boat.
"What misfortune?"
"Gentlemen Zaporoghians, let me address you?"
"Speak on!"
"Or, may be, you wish to convoke a rada?"
"Speak, we are all here!" cried the people with one accord.
"Have you, then, heard nothing about what has happened in the hetman's dominions?"[20]
"And what is the matter there?" asked the ataman of one of the koorens.