Chapter 10

Nikita awoke before daybreak. He was aroused by the cold that had begun
to creep down his back. He had dreamt that he was coming from the mill
with a load of his master's flour and when crossing the stream had
missed the bridge and let the cart get stuck. And he saw that he had
crawled under the cart and was trying to lift it by arching his back.
But strange to say the cart did not move, it stuck to his back and he
could neither lift it nor get out from under it. It was crushing the
whole of his loins. And how cold it felt! Evidently he must crawl out.
'Have done!' he exclaimed to whoever was pressing the cart down on him.
'Take out the sacks!' But the cart pressed down colder and colder,
and then he heard a strange knocking, awoke completely, and remembered
everything. The cold cart was his dead and frozen master lying upon him.
And the knock was produced by Mukhorty, who had twice struck the sledge
with his hoof.

'Andreevich! Eh, Andreevich!' Nikita called cautiously, beginning to
realize the truth, and straightening his back. But Vasili Andreevich did
not answer and his stomach and legs were stiff and cold and heavy like
iron weights.

'He must have died! May the Kingdom of Heaven be his!' thought Nikita.

He turned his head, dug with his hand through the snow about him and
opened his eyes. It was daylight; the wind was whistling as before
between the shafts, and the snow was falling in the same way, except
that it was no longer driving against the frame of the sledge but
silently covered both sledge and horse deeper and deeper, and neither
the horse's movements nor his breathing were any longer to be heard.

'He must have frozen too,' thought Nikita of Mukhorty, and indeed those
hoof knocks against the sledge, which had awakened Nikita, were the last
efforts the already numbed Mukhorty had made to keep on his feet before
dying.

'O Lord God, it seems Thou art calling me too!' said Nikita. 'Thy Holy
Will be done. But it's uncanny. . . . Still, a man can't die twice and
must die once. If only it would come soon!'

And he again drew in his head, closed his eyes, and became unconscious,
fully convinced that now he was certainly and finally dying.

It was not till noon that day that peasants dug Vasili Andreevich and
Nikita out of the snow with their shovels, not more than seventy yards
from the road and less than half a mile from the village.

The snow had hidden the sledge, but the shafts and the kerchief tied to
them were still visible. Mukhorty, buried up to his belly in snow, with
the breeching and drugget hanging down, stood all white, his dead head
pressed against his frozen throat: icicles hung from his nostrils, his
eyes were covered with hoar-frost as though