# More Tales from Tolstoi/The Snowstorm/III.

III.
The hindmost troikas had not yet passed when my driver turned clumsily and struck the attached horses with the sledge shafts. One of the troika team thereupon fell heavily, tearing away the traces and plunging to one side.
"You cock-eyed devil, don't you see where you're going, driving over people like that? Devil take you!" began one of the drivers in a hoarse, quavering voice.
He was smallish and an old fellow, as far as I could judge from his voice and his position. He had been sitting in the hinder troika, but now leaped quickly out of the sledge and ran to the horses, never ceasing the whole time to curse my driver in the most coarse and cruel manner.
But the horses would not be pacified. The driver ran after them, and in a minute both horses and driver had vanished in the white mist of the snowstorm.
"Vas-il-y! bring the chestnut hither, we shall never get them else," his voice still resounded.
​One of the drivers, a very tall man, got out of the sledge, silently detached his three horses, saddled and bridled one of them, and, crunching the snow beneath him, disappeared in the direction of his comrade. We, with the two other horses, went after the courier's troika, which, ringing its bell, set off in front at full gallop; we just let ourselves go without troubling any more about the road.
"A pretty way of catching them!" said my driver, alluding to the other driver, who had gone off after the horses; "he'll never catch' em, and he's leading the spare horse to a place he'll never get him out of again."
Ever since my driver had begun to go back, he had become in better spirits and more inclined to be talkative, which I, of course, did not fail to take advantage of as, so far, I had no desire to sleep. I began to ask him all about himself and whence he came, and soon found out that he was a fellow-countryman, hailing from Tula country, being a small proprietor in the village of Kirpechny; that their land was of very little good to them and had quite ceased to produce grain since the cholera visitation; that there were two brothers at home, while a third had enlisted as a soldier; that the supply of bread would not hold out till Christmas, and they had to hire themselves out to make more money; that the younger brother was master in the house because he was married, while my friend was a widower; that an artel, or society of drivers, went forth from their village every year; that though he was not a coachman by profession he served at the post-station ​in order to be of some help to his brother; that he lived here, thank God, on 120 paper roubles a year, of which he sent a hundred home to his family, and that he had a pretty good time of it, but that couriers were veritable beasts, and that the people he had to do with here were always cursing him.
"That driver, for instance, why should he curse me? my little master! Did I overturn his horses on purpose? Why, I wouldn't do any harm to anyone! And why should he go scurrying after them? They would be sure to come back of their own accord. And now he'll only make the horses starve to death besides coming to grief himself" repeated the God-fearing little muzhik.
"But what is that black thing yonder?" said I, observing some black objects just in front of us.
"A train of wagons!—a nice way of going along, I must say," continued he when we had come abreast with the huge wagons covered with mats, going one after another on wheels. "Look! not a soul to be seen; they are all asleep. The horse is the wisest of them all. He knows very well what he is about. Nothing in the world will make him miss the road. We too will go alongside of them and then we shall be all right," added he, "and know where we are going."
It really was a curious sight. There were those huge wagons covered with snow from the matting atop to the wheels below, moving along absolutely alone. Only in the front corner the snow-covered mat was raised a couple of inches for a moment as our little bells resounded close to the wagons and a hat popped up. The big piebald horse, with ​outstretched neck and straining back, deliberately proceeded along the absolutely hidden road, monotonously shaking his shaggy head beneath the whitening shaft and pricking up one snow-covered ear as we came abreast of him.
After we had gone on for another half-hour the driver again turned to me.
"What do you think, sir; we are going nicely along now, eh?"
"I don't know," I replied.
"Before, the wind was anyhow, but now we are going right in the midst of the storm. No, we shall not get there; we too have lost our way," he concluded with the utmost calmness.
Evidently, although a great coward, and afraid of his own shadow, he had become quite tranquil as soon as there were a good many of us together and he was not obliged to be our guide and responsible for us. With the utmost sang froid he criticised the mistakes of the driver in front of us as if it had anything whatever to do with him. I observed indeed that now and then the troika in front was sometimes in profile, from my point of view, to the left and sometimes to the right, and it also seemed to me as if we were encircling a very limited space. However, it might have been an optical delusion, as also the circumstance that, occasionally, it seemed to me as if the troika in front was climbing up a mountain, or going along a declivity, or under the brow of a hill, whereas the steppe was everywhere uniformly level.
After we had proceeded for some time longer I ​observed, or so it seemed to me, far away, on the very horizon, a long, black, moving strip of something; but in a moment it became quite plain to me that this was the very same train of wagons which we had overtaken and outstripped. Just the same creaking wheels, some of them no longer turning, enveloped in snow; just the same people asleep beneath their mats, and just the same leading piebald horse, with steaming, distended nostrils, smelling out the road and pricking up his ears.
"Look, we have gone round and round and are coming out by this train of wagons again!" said my driver in a sulky tone. "The courier's horses are good ones, though he drives them villainously, but ours are so-so and always stopping, just as if we had been driving all night long."
He coughed a bit.
"Shall we turn off somewhere, sir, for our sins?"
"Why? We are bound to arrive somewhere as it is."
"Arrive somewhere! We shall have to make a night of it in the steppe: that's what we shall do. How it is snowing, my little master!"
Although it did seem strange to me that the driver in front of us, who had obviously lost his road and had no idea of the direction in which he was going, took no trouble to find it again, but continued to drive at full tilt, cheerily shouting to his horses, I did not want to separate from him all the same.
"Follow after them!" I said.
The driver went on, but he drove along even more unwillingly than before and no longer conversed with me.