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By Root 4005 0

wives and children, made for somewhere there, in the southeast, where none of them had ever been. They made up caravans, bought themselves out one by one, ran away, and drove, and walked there, to the warm rivers. Many were punished, exiled to Siberia, many died on the road of cold and hunger, many came back of themselves, and the movement died down, just as it had begun, without any obvious reason. But the undercurrents never ceased to flow among these people and were gathering some sort of new forces in order to manifest themselves just as strangely and unexpectedly, and at the same time as simply, naturally, and strongly. Now, in the year 1812, it was noticeable for a man living close to the people that these undercurrents were intensely at work and were close to manifesting themselves.

Alpatych, having come to Bogucharovo a short time before the old prince’s passing, noticed that there was agitation among the people and that, contrary to what was happening in the region of Bald Hills, where over a forty-mile radius all the peasants were going away (leaving their villages to be devastated by the Cossacks), in the steppe region of Bogucharovo the peasants, it was heard, had communications with the French, received some sort of leaflets that circulated among them, and were staying put. He knew through the domestic servants, who were devoted to him, that the muzhik Karp, who had great influence on the community, had made a trip in a government-owned cart the other day and come back with the news that the Cossacks devastated villages abandoned by their inhabitants, but that the French did not touch them. He knew that another muzhik, the evening before, had even brought from the village of Visloukhovo—where the French were camped—a leaflet from a French general, which announced to the inhabitants that no harm would be done them, and that whatever was taken from them would be paid for, if they stayed. As proof of it, the muzhik brought from Visloukhovo a hundred roubles in banknotes (not knowing they were counterfeit), which he had been paid in advance for hay.

Finally, most important of all, Alpatych learned that, on the same day that he ordered the headman to prepare carts for transporting the princess’s baggage from Bogucharovo, there had been a meeting of the village in the morning, at which it had been decided to wait and not go anywhere. And meanwhile time was running out. The marshal insisted, on the fifteenth of August, the day of the prince’s death, that Princess Marya should leave that same day, as it was becoming dangerous. He said that after the sixteenth he could not answer for anything. On the day of the prince’s death, he left in the evening, but promised to come for the funeral the next day. But the next day he could not come, because, according to news he had received, the French had advanced unexpectedly, and he had barely managed to remove his family and all his valuables from his estate.

For thirty years Bogucharovo had been managed by the headman Dron, whom the old prince had called Dronushka.

Dron was one of those physically and morally sturdy muzhiks who, once they come of age and grow a beard, live on that way, unchanging, until they are sixty or seventy, without a single gray hair or missing tooth, as straight and strong at the age of sixty as at thirty.

Dron, soon after the migration to the warm rivers, in which he had taken part like the others, had been made headman and mayor of Bogucharovo, and since then had remained in those duties irreproachably for twenty-three years. The muzhiks feared him more than the master. The gentlemen, both the old prince and the young, and the steward respected him and jokingly called him minister. In all the time of his service, Dron had never once been drunk or sick; never, either after sleepless nights or after any sort of labor, had he shown the slightest fatigue, and, though illiterate, never had he forgotten a single accounting of money and sacks of flour for the enormous shipments he sold, nor a single stack of grain on any acre of the Bogucharovo fields.