“Storms with mist the sky conceal!” shouted Petrúshka as he disappeared.
“There’s a poet for you!” muttered Vasíli Andréevich, pulling at the reins.
“Yes, a fine lad—a true peasant,” said Nikíta.
They drove on.
Nikíta, wrapping his coat closely about him and pressing his head down so close to his shoulders that his short beard covered his throat, sat silently, trying not to lose the warmth he had obtained while drinking tea in the house. Before him he saw the straight lines of the shafts which constantly deceived him into thinking they were on a well-travelled road, and the horse’s swaying crupper with his knotted tail blown to one side, and farther ahead the high shaft-bow and the swaying head and neck of the horse with its waving mane. Now and then he caught sight of a way-sign, so that he knew they were still on a road and that there was nothing for him to be concerned about.
Vasíli Andréevich drove on, leaving it to the horse to keep to the road. But Mukhórty, though he had had a breathing-space in the village, ran reluctantly, and seemed now and then to get off the road, so that Vasíli Andréevich had repeatedly to correct him.
“Here’s a stake to the right, and another, and here’s a third,” Vasíli Andréevich counted, “and here in front is the forest,” thought he, as he looked at something dark in front of him. But what had seemed to him a forest was only a bush. They passed the bush and drove on for another hundred yards but there was no fourth way-mark nor any forest.
“We must reach the forest soon,” thought Vasíli Andréevich, and animated by the vodka and the tea he did not stop but shook the reins,