“All my inside’s wasted away. God knows what it is.”
“My word! and does your throat hurt when you cough!”
“It hurts me all over. My death is at hand—that’s what it is. Oh, oh, oh!” moaned the sick man.
“Cover your legs up like this,” said Nastasya, pulling a coat over him as she crept off the stove.
A night-light glimmered dimly all night in the hut. Nastasya and some ten drivers lay on the floor and the lockers asleep, and snoring loudly. The sick man alone moaned faintly, coughed, and turned over on the stove. Towards morning he became quite still.
“A queer dream I had in the night,” said the cook, stretching next morning in the half-light. “I dreamed that Uncle Fyodor got down from the stove and went out to chop wood. ‘Nastasya,’ says he, ‘I’ll split you some’; and I says to him, ‘How can you chop the wood?’ and he snatched up the axe and starts chopping so fast, so fast that the chips were flying. ‘Why,’ says I, ‘you were ill, weren’t you?’ ‘No,’ says he, ‘I’m all right,’ and he swings the axe, so that it gave me quite a fright. I screamed out and waked up. Isn’t he dead, perhaps? Uncle Fyodor! Hey, uncle!”
Fyodor made no sound in reply.
“Maybe he is dead. I’ll get up and see,” said one of the drivers who was awake.
A thin hand, covered with reddish hairs, hung down from the stove; it was cold and pale.
“I’ll go and tell the overseer. He’s dead, seemingly,” said the driver.