We'll know what to do—don't you shrink! And if needs must we can shoulder a rifle as well as you...."
Semyon stamped his foot, laughing uproariously.
"There's a wench for you, by God!"
"Let go of me!"
Her shawl waving, Matryona slipped her bare feet into her boots at the door, stumped about noisily, and went out, no doubt to see to the cows.
For a long time, Semyon and Alexei sat wagging their heads, laughing and repeating:
"She's a regular ataman, that wench!"
The wind which heralds the dawn came through the open window, rustling the leaves of the aspidistras, and wafting muttered speech and snatches of a foreign song.
It was their lodger, the German, coming back drunk from the big house, and sending up clouds of dust with his boots.
Alexei shut the window angrily.
"Why don't you go and lie down, Semyon?"
"Afraid?"
"That drunken, devil might make trouble. He remembers that time you went for him."
"I'll go for him again."
Semyon rose, as if to go to his room.
"Alexei, Alexei, it's all because you're so hard to rouse that the revolution is perishing.... Wasn't Kornilov enough?
Aren't the Gaidamaks, the Germans, enough?
What more do you want?" (He broke off suddenly.) "What's that?"
A low murmur came from the yard, and the sound of heavy boots tramping about uncertainly.
A woman's voice cried angrily:
"Let me alone!"
Then came the sound of struggling and heavy breathing, and again, still louder, as if from pain, Matryona cried out:
"Semyon! Semyon!"
Semyon rushed out of the hut on his bow legs.
Alexei only grasped the bench and stayed in his place. He knew what happened when a man was roused.
"I left the axe in the entry yesterday—he'll use it." Semyon gave a savage cry out in the yard.
There came a crushing sound, a hissing and gurgling, and something fell heavily.
Matryona came in, white as a sheet, her shawl trailing.
She leaned against the stove, her breast heaving tumultuously.
Suddenly she made a pass in the air, as if unable to bear Alexei's gaze.
Semyon, calm and pale, appeared in the doorway.
"Give me a hand, brother," he said. "We must take him away and bury him...."
* V *
The German troops arrived at the Don and the Sea of Azov, and halted there.
The Germans had occupied territory of vast natural wealth, bigger than the whole of Germany.
Here, on the Don, as in the Ukraine, the German high command began immediately to interfere with political life, supporting the owners of big farms, encouraging the prosperous Cossacks—those very Cossacks who had bragged only four years ago that they would take Berlin by storm.
These same stocky, broad-faced Cossacks with the red stripes on their trousers, strong and sturdy as if cast in iron, were now as docile as lambs.
The Germans had scarcely got to Rostov when a Cossack, army, ten thousand strong, under the command of Field Ataman Popov, attacked Novocherkassk, the capital of the Don.
In a bloody battle on the high plateau above the Don, the Red Cossacks of the Novocherkassk garrison, and the Bolshevik troops hastening to their aid from Rostov, seemed to be gaining the day.
But the issue was decided by a fantastic occurrence.
The Volunteer detachment of Colonel Drozdovsky came marching out of Rumania.
On the 22nd of April they unexpectedly broke into Rostov, holding the town till nightfall, when they were beaten back.
They roamed the steppe, looking for Kornilov's army.
On their way (it was the 25th of April), they heard the noise of battle outside Novocherkassk.
Without asking who was fighting, and what it was about, they turned towards the town, made their way with an armoured car into the Red reserves, where they caused havoc.
The Don Cossacks, seeing help coming to them from on high, made a counterattack, overrunning and driving out the Reds.
Novocherkassk was occupied by the Volunteers.
The power of the Revolutionary Committee was seized by the
"Saviours of the Don" Society.
And after this came the Germans.