“Oi, vei! There you are scolding me about my bundle again! Whatever I made there by trading is my own business. Did you count my profits? I tell you I made nothing but losses out of my dealings with you, besides losing a year here on earth.”
“Oh, you swindler you!” shouted the devil.
“I a swindler? No, you’re a swindler yourself, you thief, you liar, you scab!”
And they began again to wrangle so violently that their words became quite unintelligible. They waved their arms, their skull-caps quivered, and they stood up on tip-toe like two cocks preparing to fight. The devil was the first to regain control of himself.
“But we don’t yet know who has won the bet! It is true that the miller didn’t take pity on you, but we haven’t decided the other points yet. We haven’t asked the people whether he opened a tavern or not.”
“I have opened two!” the miller thought, scratching his head again. “Oh, why didn’t I wait a year? Then Yankel would have been sent to the devil for good, but now something disagreeable may come of it.”
He looked round at his mill. Couldn’t he possibly slip away to the village by crawling behind it? But just as he was contemplating this move, the sound of muttering and of uncertain footsteps came to his ears from the wood. Yankel threw his bundle over his shoulder, and ran to the very sycamore tree where the miller was hiding. The miller hardly had time to slip behind a big willow tree before the devil and Yankel were both under the sycamore, and at that moment Gavrilo appeared at the far end of the dam. Gavrilo’s coat was in tatters and was hanging off one shoulder; his hat was on one side of his head, and his bare feet were continually quarrelling with one another. If one wanted to go to the right, the other, out of contrariness, tried to go to the left. One pulled one way and the other the other, until the poor man’s head and feet nearly flew off in opposite directions. So the poor lad staggered along, weaving patterns all across the dam from one side to the other, but not progressing forward very fast.
The devil saw that Gavrilo was full, so he came out and stood in the middle of the dam just as he was. Why the devil need any one stand on ceremony with a drunkard?
“Good evening, good fellow!” he called. “Where did you get so full?”
As he said this, the miller noticed for the first time how miserable and ragged Gavrilo had grown during the last year. And it was all because he drank up at his master’s tavern everything that he earned from his master. It was long since he had seen any money; he took it all out in vodka.