Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/127

Rh the wagon nor get out from under it! He used his whole strength to it And ugh! how cold it was! Creep out from it he must. "And I'll do it, too!" he said to someone who was pushing his back with the wagon. "Take out the sacks!" But the wagon kept pressing upon him, and it got ever colder and colder, and suddenly something gave him a harder bump than usual, and he woke up and remembered everything. The cold wagon was his dead and frozen master lying upon him. And the someone who had bumped was Brownie kicking out twice with his hoofs against the sledge.

"Andreich! Andreich!" cried Nikita, already foreseeing something of the truth, calling warily to the form of his master, who was weighing down his back. But Andreich did not answer, and his stomach and his legs were stiff and cold, and as heavy as weights.

"He must be dead," thought Nikita. "May he rest in the Kingdom of Heaven!"

He turned his head round, dug away the snow in front of him with his arm, and opened his eyes. It was quite light. The wind was still whistling through the shafts, and the snow was still sweeping down; but with this difference, that it was no longer smiting against them, but was noiselessly enveloping the sledge and the horse, rising ever higher and higher, and the movements and breathing of the horse were no longer audible. "He too must have frozen to death," thought Nikita of Brownie. And indeed those hoof-kicks against the sledge which had awakened Nikita had been the last dying efforts of the already half-frozen Brownie to keep his legs. 77