Roshchin crept out of the cart and got behind them.
The excitement was so great that he did not notice his pain any more.
The wind, still strong, was now blowing from the east, dispersing the snow and rain clouds.
By eight in the morning the sky showed clean between the high-piled clouds.
The sunlight fell in warm, swordlike rays.
The snow began to melt.
The steppe showed darker and darker, crossed here and there by emerald strips of sprouting crops, and golden strips of stubble.
Everywhere gleamed water, and the ruts in the roads had become streams.
Corpses drying in the mounds stared at the azure sky with unseeing eyes.
"Look—it's Roshchin! By God, it is!
Roshchin, how did you get here?" cried someone from a passing cart.
Roshchin turned.
Three men, their heads bandaged, their arms in slings, sat in a filthy rickety cart, driven by a gloomy Cossack with a rotting sheepskin thrown over his shoulders.
One of the three, a lean, lanky individual whose neck seemed to be craning out of his collar, greeted Roshchin with rapid nods, his cracked lips parted in a smile.
Roshchin had difficulty in recognizing in him his regimental friend Vaska Teplov, once a rosy-cheeked reveller, a woman chaser, and a tippler.
He approached the cart in silence, and embraced him.
"Who ought I to go to, Teplov, tell me that!
Who's your chief of staff?
You see my shoulder straps are only pinned on.
I only crossed the lines yesterday...."
"Get in!
Stop! Pull up, you swine!" shouted Teplov to the driver.
The Cossack grumbled but obeyed.
Roshchin swung himself on to a corner of the cart and sat with his legs hanging over the wheel.
It was bliss to be riding beneath the warm sunshine.
He related his adventures from the moment of leaving Moscow, with the impartiality of a report.
Coughing slightly, Teplov said:
"I'll take you to General Romanovsky myself.... We'll go to the village and get a feed and I'll fix you up in no time....
Did you really think you could go straight to him, you poor sap? 'Please, I've come from the Red gang....' You don't know our lot.
They'd have bayonetted you on the way to headquarters. Look!
Look!" (He pointed to a long corpse in an officer's greatcoat lying by the roadside.)
"That's Mishka, Baron Korff... remember him? Ah, what a chap he was! Got any cigarettes?
God, what a' glorious morning!
The day after tomorrow, old man, we'll be entering Ekaterinodar, we'll sleep in beds and then make straight for the park.
Music, girls, beer!"
He gave a loud, hysterical laugh.
His drawn, unhealthy-looking face broke into wrinkles, and feverish spots burned on his cheekbones.
"And it'll be music, girls, beer, all over Russia.
We'll rest a month in Ekaterinodar, and clean ourselves up, and then for reprisals!
Ha!
We're not such fools any longer, old boy.... We've purchased with our blood the right to do what we think fit with the Russian Empire.
We'll show them what order means.... The bastards!
Look at that one over there!"
He pointed to the edge of a ditch where, his limbs extended unnaturally, lay the body of a man in a sheepskin jacket.
"He was probably one of their Dantons...."
The cart was overtaken by a clumsy wicker phaeton.
In it were two persons, covered with mud, with the collars of their coats thrown back, and wet fur caps on their heads: one was a huge stout man with a dark flabby face, the other, who had an unkempt grizzled beard and bags under his eyes, held a long cigarette holder between his sagging lips.
"The saviours of their country," said Teplov, nodding towards them.
"We put up with them for want of any better.
They might be of use."