“How is that, you fool, you can not say?”
“Just so, your honor, because I have nowhere to go to. I must look for some kind of employment, your honor.”
And the station-master looked at him for a moment and fell to thinking, then he said to him: “Well, brother, stay here on the station in the mean time. But it seems to me that you are a married man? Where is your wife?”
“Yes, sir, I am married; my wife is serving at the house of a merchant at Kursk.”
“Well, then, write to your wife to come here. I shall get a free ticket for her. We will soon have a vacant watch-house here, and I will ask the division-master to give you the place.”
“Many thanks, your honor,” replied Semen.
And so he remained on the station, helping in the station-master’s kitchen, cutting wood, sweeping the courtyard and the railway platform. In two weeks his wife arrived, and Semen went on a hand-car to his new home.
The watch-house was new and warm, wood he had in plenty, the former watchman left a small garden, and there was a little less than one and a half acres of arable land on the two sides of the railroad-bed. Semen was overjoyed: he began to dream of a little homestead of his own, and of buying a horse and a cow.
He was given all the necessary supplies: a green flag, a red flag, lanterns, a signal-pipe, a hammer, a rail-key for tightening the screw-nuts, a crowbar, shovel, brooms, clinch-nails, bolts, and two books with the rules and regulations of the railroad. At first Semen did not sleep at night, for he continually repeated the regulations. If the train was due in two hours, he had already gone his rounds, and would sit on the little bench at the watch-house and look and listen: were not the rails trembling, was there no noise of an approaching train?
At last he learned by heart all the rules; though he read with difficulty and had to spell out each word, nevertheless he did learn them by heart.