Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/67

Rh thing very like satisfaction. "What's that?" he added, pointing to a black potato-plant peeping forth from under the snow.

Vasily Andreich had already pulled up the horse, whose strong sides were wet with sweat.

"What do you make of it?" he asked.

"I make this of it: that we are in the fields of Zakharovek — that is where we have gone astray."

"Lies!" cried Vasily Andreich, speaking in a very different tone to what he used at home, by his voice you would have taken him for a simple peasant.

"I lie not. I am speaking the truth, Vasily Andreich," said Nikita. "And it was plain from the sound made by the sledge itself that we were going over a potato field; and look at the bits of the plants that we have carried along with us. We are in the Zakharovek fields — not a doubt of it."

"A pretty round you've taken us out of our way!" said Vasily Andreich. "What are we to do now?"

"We must go straight on, that's all, wherever we may come out," said Nikita. "If we don't come out at Zakharovek, we shall come to some gentleman's farm or other."

Vasily Andreich obeyed, and let the horse go on again as Nikita had commanded. They went on thus for a pretty long time. Sometimes they drove along over bare fields of vegetables, whose ridges and bounds peering above the snow were strewn with the dust of the earth. Sometimes they got among stubble fields, or among fields sown with winter corn, or fields sown with summer corn, in which appeared at intervals from underneath the snow, shaking in the 17