For a long time they traveled along in silence. The man was musing on his early experiences in Krakow, the woman on her lost home in the Ukraine, and the boy letting his imagination run riot in speculation as to the sights that he should see in the great city. Their thoughts were brought suddenly from their own affairs to a commotion among the carts behind them. Drivers were reining in their horses and swinging them to the left of the road, narrow as it was, in order to let some one pass. The man whose thoughts had been thus interrupted turned around, trying to discern who it might be who was pushing forward through the long line of carts, and in a moment he saw that it was a rider on a small horse. “Way, way,” the rider was shouting. “Do you peasants think that the whole road belongs to you? . . . Stay on your farm, where you belong,” he shouted angrily at a peasant driver whose horse reared suddenly from the edge of the road to the middle. “Give me room to pass. You have no business on the highroad with an animal that jumps about like that.” “I had gone in the ditch else,” replied the peasant without surliness. The rider glanced sharply at the contents of the man’s wagon and being assured that it contained nothing but fresh straw to be sold to brick-makers, dashed ahead until he was even with the cart which held the man and woman and boy. The last named had been watching his advance curiously. Now this boy, Joseph Charnetski, was in his fifteenth year. He was not by any means handsome, though he could not be called ugly. His hair and his eyes were dark and his face was somewhat round and very pleasant. He wore rather rich, though travel-soiled, nether garments, not leather like those of the retainers, nor of coarse sacking like the peasants’ clothes, but of a good quality of homespun, and a thick, buttoned coat of the same material, which fell skirtlike nearly to the knees. On his feet were brown leather boots, whose tops were soft and loose, and so high that they reached almost to the bottom of the coat. On his head he wore a round hat like a turban. The instant the rider perceived the boy, “_Chlopak_, _chlopak_ (boy, boy),” he exclaimed in a rather croaky voice, “tell your old man to hold his horses. You come and hold mine.” The boy obeyed, but as he leaped from the wagon and grasped at the horse’s bit thong, he came to the conclusion that the stranger was no friend. In those days when the world was just emerging from a period of darkness and cruelty, it was a necessity that each man should be constantly upon his guard against other men. Robbers abounded—jealous friends often descended to mean tricks; men of noble birth and breeding thought nothing of defrauding poor peasants, and among the poor peasants themselves were those who would commit crimes for the sake of gold.