Footsteps approached. The Sołtys brought in a farmer's boy in a tattered sheepskin which did not reach to his knees, sack trousers, torn boots, and with a red scarf round his neck.
"This boy?" the doctor asked.
"He says he will go—rash youngster! I can give him a horse. But wherever at this time of——"
"Listen! If you come back in six hours, you will get twenty-five ... thirty roubles from me ... you will get what you like.... Do you hear?"
The boy looked at the doctor as if he meant to say something, but he refrained. He wiped his nose with his fingers, shuffled awkwardly, and waited.
The doctor went back to the school-teacher's bedroom. His hands were shaking, and went up to his temples automatically. He thought of a prescription, wrote it, scratched through what he had written, tore it up, and wrote a letter to the chemist instead, begging him to despatch a horseman to the town at once, to ask the doctor to send him some quinine. He bent over the sick girl and examined her afresh; then he went into the kitchen and handed the letter to the boy.
"My dear boy," he said in a strange, unnatural voice, laying his hand on the lad's shoulder and slightly shaking him, "ride as fast as the horse will go—never mind him getting winded.... Do you hear, my boy?"
The lad bowed to the ground and went out with the Sołtys.
"Is it long since the teacher settled here with you in the village?" Dr. Paweł asked the old woman who was cowering by the stove.
"It's about three winters."