When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in
their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping
beard, surrounded by heaps of melon rinds.
The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr. Shimerda.
When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log house and sit
there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows
penned him in his cave. For Antonia and me, the story of the wedding party
was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel's secret to anyone, but guarded
it jealously--as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long
ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a painful and
peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself
in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked
something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.
IX
THE FIRST SNOWFALL came early in December. I remember how the world looked
from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning:
the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out
into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff willow
bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and disappearing in
the red grass.
Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride.
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