Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 03.djvu/28

8 adjutant's, with whom he lived, when the order was brought.

"You are sure you are not fibbing, my friend! If not, I must go to my company and give a few orders for to-morrow," said Staff-Captain Sh.

"No—why should I? How could I—I certainly—" muttered the low-ranked stranger, suddenly growing silent. He evidently decided to feel offended, wrinkled his brow in an unnatural manner, and, mumbling something, again began to roll cigarettes. The crushed tobacco which he poured out of the chintz pouch did not suffice, and so he asked Sh to loan him a little cigarette.

We for a long time continued the same monotonous military prattle, which everybody who has been on expeditions knows; we used the same expressions in complaining about the dulness and duration of the expedition; in precisely the same manner reflected on the authorities; in just the same way, as often before, praised one companion and pitied another; wondered how much this one had won or that one lost, and so on.

"Well, my friends, our adjutant is having an awful streak of luck," said Staff-Captain Sh. "He has been winning all the time at the staff. No matter with whom he used to sit down, he always cleaned them out, but he has been losing these two months. Our present detachment is not doing him any good. I think he must have let shp some two thousand roubles, and he is minus five hundred roubles' worth of things: the rug which he had won of Múkhin, the Nikítin pistols, and Sáda's gold watch which Vorontsóv had made him a present of."

"Serves him right," said Lieutenant О, "for he has been doing us so badly that it became impossible to play with him."

"He has been doing everybody, but now he has gone up the flue himself," said the staff-captain, with a good