Up came the Soltys’ wife, all in tears, crying that their cart had been stolen from them! The news was like a thunderbolt, and for a time they stood breathless, staring at each other with panic-stricken looks. A horse and cart stolen together! such a thing had never been heard of. “There’s a curse upon Lipka!” “And it is heavier every week!” “Of old, fewer mishaps took place in a year than now in one month.” “What, oh, what will be the end of it all!” they whispered, stricken with awe. They all immediately hastened to Balcerkova’s orchard, wherein the footprints of a horse were distinctly seen on the dewy grass and the damp earth; these they followed to the Soltys’ granary. It was there that the horse had been harnessed and driven round about the path near the miller’s, into the road that ran towards Vola. Half the village followed the traces in that direction; but these at last disappeared near the burnt cornstacks in Podlesie so completely that no further clue could be found. This robbery had dispirited them all so that, in spite of the magnificent weather, few were in a state to work. They went about dejectedly, wringing their hands, condoling with Balcerkova, and each of them most anxious for the safety of her own property. As to the old dame, she stood beside the stable-door as by a catafalque, weeping bitterly, and pouring out by fits and starts words interspersed with sighs: “O my chestnut horse, my only one, my beloved, you the best of all my servants!—Ah me! he was but in his tenth year; I had bred him from his foaling! Even as one of my own children he was.... Foaled the very year my Staho was born!—What shall we do without you now, alas!” Her complaints were all the more sincere and hearty, because just then, no men being on her farm, it was as bad to lose both her hands (she said) as lose her horse. Of course her neighbours surrounded her with quaint attempts at consolation, and general praises of her horse’s good points. “A first-rate beast, still in its prime, and gentle as a child!” “It kicked my boy, neighbour; but all the same, ’twas a splendid animal.” “And though it had a spavin on one leg, it was worth forty roubles any day.” “As playful as a kitten, it was! How it used to pull down the bedding from the fences!” “We shall not look upon its like soon,” they all agreed, speaking as of a dead Christian!—And whenever Balcerkova cast a glance at the manger, her sorrow welled forth afresh, and the empty stable, like a freshly-dug grave, evoked the remembrance of her loss, and the cruel injury done to her; and she was only soothed a little when she learned that the Soltys had taken Pete from Boryna’s, Valek from the priest’s, and, together with the miller’s man, had started off after the Tsiganes. “Ye may as well pursue the wind in the plain. ‘They that steal, can conceal,’” said one. And indeed they returned very late, announcing that every trace of them had disappeared like a stone in the water.