"Now you," he said, "are a cross fellow, but your friend is meek; he has written a letter home, and they will send five thousand roubles. He will be fed well, and will not be insulted." So Zhilín said: "My friend may do as he pleases; maybe he is rich, but I am not. As I have said, so will it be. If you want to, kill me,--you will not gain by it,--but more than five hundred will I not give." They were silent for awhile. Suddenly Abdul jumped up, fetched a small box, took out a pen, a piece of paper, and some ink, put it all before Zhilín, slapped him on the shoulder, and motioned for him to write. He agreed to the five hundred. "Wait awhile," Zhilín said to the interpreter. "Tell him that he has to feed us well, and give us the proper clothes and shoes, and keep us together,--it will be jollier for us,--and take off the stocks." He looked at the master and laughed. The master himself laughed. He listened to the interpreter, and said: "I will give you the best of clothes,--a Circassian mantle and boots,--you will be fit to marry. We will feed you like princes. And if you want to stay together, you may live in the shed. But the stocks cannot be taken off, for you will run away. For the night we will take them off." He ran up to Zhilín, and tapped him on the shoulder: "You goot, me goot!" Zhilín wrote the letter, but he did not address it right. He thought he would run away. Zhilín and Kostylín were taken back to the shed. They brought for them maize straw, water in a pitcher, bread, two old mantles, and worn soldier boots. They had evidently been pulled off dead soldiers. For the night the stocks were taken off, and they were locked in the barn. III. Zhilín and his companion lived thus for a whole month. Their master kept laughing. "You, Iván, goot, me, Abdul, goot!" But he did not feed them well. All he gave them to eat was unsalted millet bread, baked like pones, or entirely unbaked dough. Kostylín wrote home a second letter. He was waiting for the money to come, and felt lonesome. He sat for days at a time in the shed counting the days before the letter would come, or he slept. But Zhilín knew that his letter would not reach any one, and so he did not write another. "Where," he thought, "is my mother to get so much money? As it is, she lived mainly by what I sent her. If she should collect five hundred roubles, she would be ruined in the end. If God grants it, I will manage to get away from here." And he watched and thought of how to get away. He walked through the village and whistled, or he sat down somewhere to work with his hands, either making a doll from clay, or weaving a fence from twigs. Zhilín was a great hand at all kinds of such work.