Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/232

Tales from Tolstoi too. He set to work at home, helped his son to get in a store of winter fuel, helped the women to thresh the corn, thatched the barn, saw to the bees, gave ten hives of bees, with the increment, to his neighbour. His old woman would have concealed from him how many swarms had flown out of the hives that had been sold, but Elisyei himself knew which had swarmed and which had not, and gave the neighbour seventeen instead of ten hives. So Elisyei set his house in order, and sent his son to seek work, but he himself settled down for the winter to plait bast-shoes and carve out lasts for the cobblers.

The whole of that day, when Elisyei remained in the hut with the sick people, Efim waited for his companion. He went a little way on, and sat down. He waited and waited, nodded a bit, woke again, waited a little longer—and his comrade never came. He looked around him with all his eyes. The sun had already gone behind the wood, and there was no Elisyei.

"I wonder if he has passed me by," thought he, "or ridden by on some wagon, and I never observed it while I slept? But it was impossible not to have seen him. In the steppe we can see for a long distance. What's the good of going back," he thought, "when he's coming forward. We might miss each other, that would be worst of all. I'll go on, and we shall meet at our night-quarters." 182