Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/166

160 enemies of Christ can not only take your very trousers off you, but can even sneeze in your faces without your hearing them!"

The kazáks all stood with drooping heads, knowing well that they were guilty: only one, Kukubenko, the atamán of the Nezamaisky kurén, answered back. "Stop, father!" said he; "although it's not lawful to make such a retort when the Koshevói speaks, in the presence of the whole army, yet it is necessary to say that that wasn't the way of it. You have not been quite just in your reprimand. The kazáks would have been guilty and deserving of death, had they got drunk on the march, during war, or heavy, toilsome labour; but we have been camped down here unoccupied, loitering in vain before the city. It was not a Fast, or any other time of Christian abstinence: how can a man do otherwise than get drunk in idleness? There's no sin in that. But we'd better show them what it is to attack innocent people. They first beat us well, and now we'll give them such a beating that they won't carry five of them home again."

The speech of the barrack atamán pleased the kazáks. They raised their utterly despondent heads upright, and many nodded approvingly, muttering: "Kukubenko has spoken well!" And Taras Bulba, who stood not far from the