Ignat ceased. Again all was quiet, and the wind howled and whined, and the whirling snow began to lie thicker on our sledge. The counsellor came up to us.
“Well, what is it?”
“What, indeed; which way are we to go?”
“Who knows?”
“Why, are your feet frozen, that you keep beating them together?”
“They’re quite numb.”
“You should take a run. There’s something over yonder; isn’t it a Kalmuck encampment? It would warm your feet, anyway.”
“All right. Hold the horses … there.”
And Ignat ran in the direction indicated.
“One must keep looking and walking round, and one will find something; what’s the sense of driving on like a fool?” the counsellor said to me. “See, what a steam the horses are in!”
All the time Ignat was gone—and that lasted so long that I began to be afraid he was lost—the counsellor told me in a calm, self-confident tone, how one must act during a blizzard, how the best thing of all was to unyoke a horse and let it go its own way; that as God is holy, it would lead one right; how one could sometimes see by the stars, and how if he had been driving the leading sledge, we should have been at the station long ago.
“Well, is it?” he asked Ignat, who was coming back, stepping with difficulty almost knee-deep in the snow.