'I want a job too.' The settler frowned.
'You won't get one here!'
Seeing that Slimak was looking round, he went to the inspector and spoke to him.
'No work for carters,' the latter at once shouted, 'no work! As it is we have too many, you are only getting in people's way. Be off!' The brutal way in which this order was given so bewildered the peasant that, in turning, he almost upset his cart; he drove off at full speed, feeling as if he had offended some great power which had worked enough destruction already and was now turning hills into valleys and valleys into hills.
But gradually he reflected more calmly. People from the village had been taken on, and he remembered seeing peasants' carts at the embankment. Why had he been driven away?
It was quite clear that some one wished to shut him out.
'Curse the Judases, they're outdoing the Jews,' he muttered and felt a horror of the Germans for the first time.
He told his wife briefly that there was no work, and betook himself to the settlement. Old Hamer seemed to be in the middle of a heated argument with Hirschgold and two other men. When he caught sight of the peasant he took them into the barn.
'Sly dog,' murmured Slimak; 'he knows what I've come for. I'll tell him straight to his face when he comes out.'
But at every step his courage failed him more and more. He hesitated between his desire to turn back and his unwillingness to lose a job; he hung about the fences, and looked at the women digging in their gardens. A murmur like the hum of a beehive caught his ears: one of the windows in Hamer's house was open and he looked into a schoolroom.