The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

It turned out that father, mother, and the entire household as well had not slept that night. They had expected us without fail, and ever since the snowstorm had broken out in the evening, there had been great anxiety as to whether we had lost our way, or some other misfortune had befallen us: we might have broken a shaft in a pothole, we might have been attacked by wolves … Father had sent several men on horseback with lanterns to meet us, but the storm had torn the lanterns from their hands and extinguished them, and neither men nor horses could get very far from the house. A man trudges on for a long time—it seems to him that he’s going against the storm, and suddenly—halt, the horse refuses to move from the spot. The rider urges it on, though he is so choked he can hardly breathe, but the horse doesn’t move … The horseman dismounts, so as to take the bridle and lead the frightened animal on, and suddenly, to his surprise, he discovers that his horse is standing with its forehead leaning against the wall of the stable or the shed … Only one of the scouts made it a little further and had an actual encounter on his way: this was the harness-maker Prokhor. They gave him an outrunner, a postillion’s horse, who used to take the bit between his teeth, so that the iron didn’t touch his lips, and as a result became insensible to any restraint. He carried Prokhor off into the very hell of the snowstorm, and galloped for a long time, kicking up his rump and bobbing his head down to his knees, until finally, during one of these capers, the harness-maker went flying over the horse’s head and landed right in the middle of some strange heap of living people, who, however, at first did not show him any friendliness. On the contrary, one of them straightaway fetched him a whack on the head, another made corrections to his back, and a third set about trampling him with his feet and poking him with something cold, metallic, and extremely uncomfortable for his senses.

Prokhor was nobody’s fool: he realized he was dealing with special creatures and started shouting furiously.

The terror he felt probably lent his voice special force, and he was immediately heard. For his salvation, right there, a couple of steps away from him, a “fiery glow” appeared. This was the light that had been placed in the window of our kitchen, by the wall of which huddled the police chief, his secretary, his messenger, and a coachman with a troika of horses, stuck in a snowdrift.

They, too, had lost their way and, ending up by our kitchen, thought they were somewhere in a field by a haystack.

They were dug out and taken, some to the kitchen, some to the house, where the police chief was now having tea, hoping to get back to his family in town before they woke up and started worrying about his absence after such a stormy night.

“That’s splendid,” said my aunt. “The police chief is the one we need most of all now.”

“Yes, he’s a plucky fellow—he’ll give it to Selivashka!” people chimed in, and we raced on at a gallop and drove up to the house while the police chief’s troika was still standing at our porch.

They would at once tell the police chief everything, and half an hour later the brigand Selivan would already be in his hands.

XVIII

My father and the police chief were struck by what we had endured on the way and especially in the house of the brigand Selivan, who had wanted to kill us and take our things and money …

By the way, about the money. At the mention of it, my aunt at once exclaimed:

“Ah, my God! Where is my box?”

Where, indeed, was that box and the thousands that were in it?

Just imagine, it wasn’t there! Yes, yes, it was the one thing that wasn’t there, either among the things brought inside, or in the sleigh—in short, not anywhere … The box had obviously remained there and was now in the hands of Selivan … Or … maybe he had even stolen it during the night. It would have been possible for him; as the owner, he would know all the cracks in his wretched house, and there were probably not a few of them … He might have a removable floorboard or a loose plank in the partition.

And the police chief, with his experience in tracking down robberies, had only just uttered this last suggestion about the loose plank, which Selivan might quietly have removed at night and reached through to make away with the box, when my aunt covered her face with her hands and collapsed into an armchair.

Fearing for her box, she had hidden it precisely in the corner under the bench that stood against the partition separating our night lodgings from the part of the cottage where Selivan and his wife lived …

“Well, there you are!” exclaimed the police chief, glad of the correctness of his experienced reasoning. “You put the box there for him yourself! … But all the same I’m surprised that neither you, nor your people, nor anybody missed it when it came time for you to leave.”

“My God, we were all so frightened!” my aunt moaned.