Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/137

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TARAS BULBA
131

to his mind, "The Zaporozhtzi are like children: if there is little they eat it, if there is much they leave nothing." What was he to do? Still, somewhere in the wagon belonging to his father's regiment there was, he thought, a sack of white bread, which they had found when they pillaged the bakery of a monastery. He went straight to his father's load, but it was not there. Ostap had taken it and put it under his head; and there he lay, stretched out on the ground, snoring so that the whole plain reverberated. Andríi seized the sack abruptly with one hand, and gave it a jerk, so that Ostap's head fell on the ground, and the latter sprang up, half awake, and sitting there, with closed eyes, shouted at the top of his lungs: "Stop him! Stop the damned Lyakh! Catch the horse!"—"Silence! I'll kill you!" shouted Andríi, in terror, brandishing the sack over him. But Ostap did not continue his speech, quieted down, and emitted such a snore that the grass on which he lay undulated with his breath.

Andríi glanced timidly about him on all sides, to see if Ostap's dream-ravings had waked any of the kazáks. Only one scalp-locked head rose up in the adjoining barrack, glanced about, then dropped back on the ground. After waiting a couple of minutes, he set out with his burden. The Tatár woman still lay there, scarcely breath-