Therefore the tobacconist
had in all probability not yet returned. The night was fairly warm, and
the Cossack sat down upon a doorstep, lighted a cigarette and waited. In
spite of long years spent in the midst of German civilisation, it was
still as natural to him to sit down in the open air at night and to watch
the stars, as though he had never changed his own name for the plain
German appellation of Johann Schmidt, nor laid aside the fur cap and the
sheepskin coat of his tribe for the shabby jacket and the rusty black hat
of higher social development.
There was no truth in Akulina's statement that a thunder-storm was
approaching. The stars shone clear and bright, high above the narrow
street, and the solitary man looked up at them, and remembered other days
and a freer life and a broader horizon; days when he had been younger than
he was now, a life full of a healthier labour, a horizon boundless as that
of the little street was limited. He thought, as he often thought when
alone in the night, of his long journeys on horseback, driving great
flocks of bleating sheep over endless steppes and wolds and expanses of
pasture and meadow; he remembered the reddening of the sheep's woolly
coats in the evening sun, the quick change from gold to grey as the sun
went down, the slow transition from twilight to night, the uncertain gait
of his weary beast as the darkness closed in, the soft sound of the sheep
huddling together, the bark of his dog, the sudden, leaping light of the
camp-fire on the distant rising ground, the voices of greeting, the
bubbling of the soup kettle, the grateful rest, the song of the wandering
Tchumak--the pedlar and roving newsman of the Don.
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