Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 03.djvu/21

Rh Sh, who, puffing and smiling good-naturedly, with his feet dragging on the ground, rode on the back of short and sickly Lieutenant O.

It grew late, and the orderlies brought us three glasses of tea for the six men present, and we, having finished the game, went up to the wicker benches. Near them stood a strange man of low stature, with crooked legs, wearing an uncovered fur coat and a lambskin cap with long, white, straight fur.

The moment we came up close to him he several times took off and put on again his cap, and seemed to make several attempts at approaching us, and then stopped again. Having apparently decided that he could not remain unnoticed much longer, this stranger doffed his cap and, making a circle around us, walked over to Staff-Captain Sh.

"Ah, Guskantini! Well, my friend?" Sh said to him, still smiling good-naturedly under the influence of the ride.

Guskantini, as Sh had called him, at once put on his cap and acted as though he put his hands in the pockets of his short fur coat; but on the side which was nearest to me there was no pocket in his coat, and his small red hand was left in an awkward position.

I wanted to determine who this man was, whether a yunker or a reduced officer, and, without noticing that my look, being that of a stranger to him, disconcerted him, gazed fixedly at his dress and his exterior. He seemed to be about thirty years old. His small, gray, round eyes peeped sleepily and, at the same time, restlessly from underneath the dirty white fur of his cap, which hung down over his face. His thick, irregular nose, between sunken cheeks, accentuated a sickly, unnatural leanness. His lips, hardly covered by a soft, scanty, whitish moustache, were in a constantly restless condition, as though trying to assume now this, now that, expression. But all