“All right.⁠ ⁠… Nice gentlefolk,⁠ ⁠…” he muttered. “Took his little lad to school⁠—but how he is doing now I haven’t heard say⁠—in Slavyanoserbsk. I say there is no establishment for teaching them to be very clever.⁠ ⁠… No, that’s true⁠—a nice little lad, no harm in him.⁠ ⁠… He’ll grow up and be a help to his father.⁠ ⁠… You, Yegory, are little now, but you’ll grow big and will keep your father and mother.⁠ ⁠… So it is ordained of God, ‘Honour your father and your mother.’⁠ ⁠… I had children myself, but they were burnt.⁠ ⁠… My wife was burnt and my children,⁠ ⁠… that’s true.⁠ ⁠… The hut caught fire on the night of Epiphany.⁠ ⁠… I was not at home, I was driving in Oryol. In Oryol.⁠ ⁠… Marya dashed out into the street, but remembering that the children were asleep in the hut, ran back and was burnt with her children.⁠ ⁠… Next day they found nothing but bones.”

About midnight Yegorushka and the wagoners were again sitting round a small camp fire. While the dry twigs and stems were burning up, Kiruha and Vassya went off somewhere to get water from a creek; they vanished into the darkness, but could be heard all the time talking and clinking their pails; so the creek was not far away. The light from the fire lay a great flickering patch on the earth; though the moon was bright, yet everything seemed impenetrably black beyond that red patch. The light was in the wagoners’ eyes, and they saw only part of the great road; almost unseen in the darkness the wagons with the bales and the horses looked like a mountain of undefined shape. Twenty paces from the camp fire at the edge of the road stood a wooden cross that had fallen aslant. Before the camp fire had been lighted, when he could still see things at a distance, Yegorushka had noticed that there was a similar old slanting cross on the other side of the great road.