'Oh, you don't hear... shoo! The tambourines... and whistling too....Do you hear? Take off your cap... you will hear better.' I didn't take off my cap, but I listened. 'Well, yes... perhaps. But what of it?' Filofey turned round facing the horses. 'It's a cart coming... lightly; iron-rimmed wheels,' he observed, and he took up the reins. 'It's wicked folks coming, master; hereabouts, you know, near Tula, they play a good many tricks.' 'What nonsense! What makes you suppose it's sure to be wicked people?' 'I speak the truth... with tambourines... and in an empty cart.... Who should it be?' 'Well... is it much further to Tula?' 'There's twelve miles further to go, and not a habitation here.' 'Well, then, get on quicker; it's no good lingering.' Filofey brandished the whip, and the coach rolled on again. Though I did not put much faith in Filofey, I could not go to sleep. 'What if it really is so?' A disagreeable sensation began to stir in me. I sat up in the coach--till then I had lain down--and began looking in all directions. While I had been asleep, a slight fog had come over, not the earth, but the sky; it stood high, the moon hung a whitish patch in it, as though in smoke. Everything had grown dim and blended together, though it was clearer near the ground. Around us flat, dreary country; fields, nothing but fields--here and there bushes and ravines--and again fields, mostly fallow, with scanty, dusty grass. A wilderness... deathlike! If only a quail had called! We drove on for half an hour. Filofey kept constantly cracking his whip and clicking with his lips, but neither he nor I uttered a word. So we mounted the hillside.... Filofey pulled up the horses, and promptly said again: 'It is a rattle of wheels, master; yes, it is!' I poked my head out of the coach again, but I might have stayed under the cover of the hood, so distinctly, though still from a distance, the sound reached me of cart-wheels, men whistling, the jingling of tambourines, and even the thud of horses' hoofs; I even fancied I could hear singing and laughter. The wind, it is true, was blowing from there, but there was no doubt that the unknown travellers were a good mile, perhaps two, nearer us. Filofey and I looked at one another; he only gave his hat a tweak forward from behind, and at once, bending over the reins, fell to whipping up the horses. They set off at a gallop, but they could not gallop for long, and fell back into a trot again. Filofey continued to whip them. We must get away! I can't account for the fact that, though I had not at first shared Filofey's apprehensions, about this time I suddenly gained the conviction that we really were being followed by highwaymen.... I had heard nothing new: the same tambourines, the same rattle of a cart without a load, the same intermittent whistling, the same confused uproar.... But now I had no doubt. Filofey could not have made a mistake!