Free Two Captains by Veniamin Kaverin Page A

over us in the dark and lies down. She is spending that night with us.
    It's all very well to pretend you're asleep when you're not sleepy! I open my eyes with an effort. What's the time? Three o'clock is still a long way off. A sound of drunken singing comes from the river. The pebbles roll on the bank. But still there is no signal. Just the wall clock ticking and Aunt Dasha sighing as she tosses from side to side.
    To keep awake, I sit up and rest my head on my knees. I am pretending to be asleep. I hear a whistle, but I can't wake up.
    Afterwards Pyotr told me he had whistled himself as hoarse as a gypsy until he wakened me. But he kept whistling all the time I was putting on my boots and my overcoat and stuffing the cookings into the haversack. Was he cross! He ordered me to turn up the collar of my overcoat and we made off.
    Everything went well. Nobody touched us-neither dogs nor men. To be on the safe side, though, we made a detour of about two miles round the town.
    On the way I tried to find out from Pyotr whether he was sure that travelling on the railways these days was free of charge. He told me he was sure; if the worst came to the worst we could hide under the seats. It was two nights' travel to Moscow. The passenger train was due to leave at 5.40.
    But when, to avoid the patrols, we jumped the fence some half a mile from the station we found that there was no 5.40 train. The wet, black rails glinted dully, and yellow lanterns burned dimly at the points. What were we to do? Wait at the station till morning? Impossible: the patrols might catch us. Return home?
    At that moment a bearded coupler all covered with grease, crawled out from under a freight train and came towards us, stepping over the sleepers.
    "Please, mister," Pyotr accosted him boldly, "how do we get to Moscow from here-on the right or on the left!"
    The man looked at him, then at me. I turned cold. "Now he'll hand us over to the commandant's."
    "It's three hundred miles to Moscow, my lads."
    "Please, mister, we only want to know-is it on the right or on the left?"
    The coupler laughed.
    "On the left."
    "Thank you. Come along to the left, Sanya!"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TO STRIVE. TO SEEK, TO FIND AND NOT TO YIELD
    All journeys are much alike when the travellers are eleven or twelve years old, when they travel under the carriages and do not wash for months.
    You only have to scan a few books dealing with the life of waifs to see this for yourself. That is why I am not going to describe our journey from our town of Ensk to Moscow.
    Aunt Dasha's commandments were soon forgotten. We swore, fought and smoked (sometimes dried dung, to keep warm); sometimes it was an aunt travelling to Orenburg for salt who had lost us on the way; at other times we were refugees who were going to join our grandma in Moscow. We gave ourselves out to be brothers-this made a touching impression. As we couldn't sing, I recited on the trains the letter from the navigating officer. I remember how, at Vyshny Volochok station, a young-looking though grey-haired naval man made me repeat the letter twice.
    "Very strange," he said, looking at me closely with his stern grey eyes. "Lieutenant Sedov's expedition? Very strange."
    We were not waifs, though. Like Captain Hatteras (Pyotr told me about him with a wealth of detail which Jules Verne himself had never suspected), we were going forward, forever forward. Not only because in Turkestan there was bread, while here there were none. We were going out to discover a new land of sunny cities and rich orchards. We had sworn an oath to each other.
    What a help that oath was to us!
    Once at Staraya Russa we strayed from the road and lost our way in the forest. I lay down in the snow and closed my eyes. Pyotr tried to scare me with talk about wolves, he swore and even hit me, but all in vain. I couldn't take another step. So then he took off his cap and flung it down in the snow.
    "You swore an oath, Sanya," he said, "to strive, to seek, to find