Telegin was the first to jump, turning to the Khvalinsk men who were crawling over the rail with a cry of:
"Follow me!
Hurrah!"
He ran down the planks to the shore.
A cheering crowd followed him, shooting, running, stumbling.
The bank was deserted.
A few figures seemed to be stirring in the undergrowth of some orchards.
There was a little firing from rooftops.
And now, quite far away, on the hills, the machine gun barked intermittently, fell silent, and fired a couple or so more rounds.
The enemy refused to accept battle.
Telegin found himself on a kind of unevenly paved square.
Hardly giving himself time to regain his breath, he looked round, and rallied his men.
The soles of his bare feet burned, he must have grazed them on some stones.
The air smelt of dust.
The shutters of the wooden houses were closed.
Not even the leaves of the lilacs and acacias stirred.
Four pairs of long underdrawers depended from a line over a balcony on a two-storeyed corner house with a pretentious turret.
"They'll be stolen," thought Telegin to himself.
The town seemed to be fast asleep, and the firing, the running, the cries merely a part of its dreams.
Inquiring the locality of the post office, the telegraph office, and the water tower, Telegin dispatched parties of ten to them.
The men advanced, their nerves still on edge, starting continually, levelling their rifles at every rustle.
The enemy was nowhere in sight.
The starlings were beginning to sing, and the pigeons were flying upwards from the rooftops.
Telegin's detachment occupied the house of the town Soviet, a brick building with peeling pillars.
All the doors were wide open, and the entrance hall was strewn with weapons.
Telegin went out on to a balcony.
Beneath him stretched luxuriant orchards, long unpainted roofs, empty, dusty streets—all the quiet of a country town.
And suddenly the alarm was sounded somewhere far away: the nervous, rapid, hollow voice of a bell floated over the town.
Rapid firing came from the direction of the brassy cry for help, accompanied by the explosion of hand grenades, shouts, the heavy thud of horses' hoofs, yells.
It was Zakharkin's landing party cutting off the enemy's retreat to the mountains.
Then horsemen came galloping along a side street, with a metallic clanging of horseshoes.
And once again all was quiet.
Ivan Ilyich went down with unhurried steps to report at the steamer that the town was occupied.
After hearing him out, Khvedin said:
"The Soviet power has been restored.
There's nothing more for us to do here.
We must go on."
He gave a friendly pat to the shoulder of the old captain, who was half-dead with fright: "So you've smelt powder, at last!
Well, old fellow.... I give up the command ... take the watch!"
Telegin slept till evening to the thumping of machinery and the murmuring of water.
The sunset spread its transparent hazy glow over the horizon.
Soft part-singing—the voices floating away into the abandoned spaces of the steppe—could be heard from the stern.
The vain beauty of the sunset glow lay over the river banks, the water, invaded the sight, the heart....
"Why so dismal, brothers?" cried Khvedin.
"Why not sing something jolly while you're about it?"
He, too, had slept, and, after tossing off a tumbler of spirits, was strolling up and down the upper deck, hitching up his trousers.
"If we could only take Syzran!
What d'you say, Comrade Telegin?
What a drubbing we'd give them!"
He was continually laughing, exposing his white teeth.