Steam was rolling upwards from the distended sides of his horse.
"Where's the Comrade Commander?"
Several men rushed out into the porch, hastily fastening their coats.
Sapozhkov made his appearance, clad in a sheepskin cavalry jacket.
"I'm the commander," he said, pushing them aside.
The Cossack, stopping to take breath, said, leaning on the pommel:
"The entire outpost has been killed.
I'm the only one who got across."
"What else?"
"This: you can expect Kornilov here tonight, with all his forces...."
Those on the porch exchanged glances.
Amongst them were Communists, the organizers of the village defences.
Sapozhkov sniffed, the skin under his chin gathering into folds.
"I'm ready—what about you, Comrades?"
The Cossack, alighting from his horse, began telling them how the Circassians from General Erdeli's brigade had cut down the outpost.
Soldiers, Cossack women and little boys crowded round the porch.
All listened in silence.
Roshchin, his head swathed in the folds of his hood, came up too.
He had managed to get a sleep and dry his clothes in a hot and stinking hut, in which about fifty Red soldiers lay huddled on the floor among leggings and wet clothes.
The woman of the house had baked bread at dawn, cutting it up with her own hands, and distributing slices all round.
"Fight well, soldiers! Don't let the officers get into our village!"
The Red soldiers had answered the young housewife:
"Don't you be afraid! The only thing you have to fear is...."
Here they used a word which made her brandish the loaf at them:
"You bulls, you! On the eve of death, too! Always the same...."
Every bone in Roshchin's body was aching after the night's march.
But his determination was firm.
He had been digging the frozen ground in the vegetable plots ever since morning.
Then he had carried ammunition boxes from the carts into the village council.
Everyone got a cup of spirits with dinner, and the fiery liquid had driven away his aches and soothed the pain in his joints; he decided not to postpone matters, but to finish off what he had to do that very day.
And now he was hanging about the porch, seeking an opportunity to get himself detailed to one of the outposts.
Everything had been thought out, to the captain's shoulder straps sewn into the front of his tunic.
It all turned out as he had expected.
The stocky sailor standing beside Sapozhkov came down from the porch and began appealing for volunteers for the dangerous job.
"Brothers!" he cried in a thunderous voice. "Is there anyone here ready to risk his life?"
An hour later Roshchin left the village with one of the parties of fifty soldiers, and set out for the mist-enveloped plain rolling drearily ahead.
The languid dusk was falling.
The snow had stopped and the wind lashed their faces with gusts of heavy rain.
They marched over a pathless sheet of water as if they were passing through a lake, towards some mounds where trenches had to be dug-
A flash as of lightning, followed by a boom and a wail rent the damp morning mist. And the next moment shots ' rang out in confusion over the mounds and the bank of the river.
Again a flash of lightning, a shell burst, and the crack-crack of a machine gun from somewhere in front.
This was Kornilov approaching.
His leading units were already at the other side of the river.
Roshchin thought he could distinguish a few stooping figures, running right up to the bushes next to the water.
His heart beat.
He leaned out of the shallow trench dug in the bank of the stream.
The turbid yellow-green water whirled by level with the banks.
In the middle of the stream, to the left, could be seen a half-flooded bridge.
A score or so of those vague figures clambered on to it from the water, and ran crouching along it.
The firing from the mounds grew more and more confused and frequent over the river and the bridge.