"Yes, I do," said Katya.
"Your husband's in the White bands, of course."
"Yes, My husband has been killed...."
"I wouldn't swear that it wasn't my bullet that finished him off."
He bared his teeth.
Katya cast a rapid glance at him and stumbled.
Mishka supported her elbow.
She released her arm, shaking her head.
"I'm from the Caucasian front.... I've only been here four weeks, I've been fighting the White bands all the time.
Plenty of bullets were lodged in aristocratic bones from this rifle."
Again Katya shook her head.
He walked along in silence for a time, and then said, laughing:
"We certainly did get into a mess at the village of Ltaianskaya.
Our Varnav Regiment was shot to smithereens.
Commissar Sokolovsky was killed, Commander Sapozhkov went ahead with a handful of men, all wounded.... And I escaped through the German front to the Old Man.
It's more fun here.
Nobody stands over you—it's the People's Army.
We're guerrillas, little lady, we're not bandits.
We choose our commanders ourselves.... And we get rid of them ourselves—just take out a revolver and bang, bang—off he goes! There's only one man over us all—the Old Man himself.... You think, if we plunder a train, everything will be squandered on drink?
Nothing of the sort.
All property is handed over to headquarters.
Distribution to be made there.
Some goes to the peasants, some to the army.
The trains are our supply bases.
And we, the People's Army, that is to say the people themselves, are in a state of war with Germany.
That's how the matter stands.
We cut the throats of the landowners.
And the gendarmes and hetman officers had better not fall into our hands—we finish them off with cold steel.
Small Austrian and German detachments we push back to Ekaterinoslav.
That's the sort of bandits we are."
It seemed as if there could never be an end to the stars over the steppe.
But far away, in the direction towards which they were travelling, the sky was turning a faint green.
Katya stumbled more and more frequently, and could not always suppress a sigh.
But Mishka was impervious to everything—it seemed as if he could have marched on for thousands of miles, his rifle at his back.
Katya had now only one care: not to betray her growing weakness, not to give this contemptuous braggart an excuse to pity her....
"You're all bad—all of you," she said, halting and adjusting her shawl to give herself a breathing space, and once more toiling over the wormwood and the gopher holes.
"Why should we bear sons for you to kill?
It's a sin to kill, and that's all about it."
"We know all that!
That's all woman's stuff, it's as old as the hills," said Mishka glibly.
"Our commissar explained it to us this way:
'Look at everything from the class point of view...' you're aiming your gun at a class phenomenon, not a human being.
See?
Pity doesn't come in here, it would be sheer counterrevolution.
There's something more important, my dear...."
Suddenly his voice changed strangely. It sounded hollow, as if be were listening to his own words.
"I shan't always be dangling about the front with a rifle.
Everyone says Mishka is a lost soul, a drunkard, he'll end up at the bottom of a pit.
That's the truth, but not the whole truth.... I'm in no hurry to die, in fact I don't want to die a bit.... The bullet which will finish me hasn't yet been cast."
He pushed the tuft of hair off his forehead.