The Cossack, Daniel Lifánof, belonged to the Strelétsky Settlement, on the watershed of the Vólga and the Urál. He was thirty-four, and was completing the last month of the term of his army service. At home he had a grandfather, a man of ninety (who could remember Pougatchéf ); two brothers; a sister-in-law (the wife of an elder brother who had been sent to the mines for being an Old Believer); a wife; and two sons. His father had been killed in the war with the French. He was the head of the family. In his homestead they had sixteen horses and two yoke of oxen, and they had a good deal of land sown with wheat. Daniel had served in Órenburg and Kazán. He kept strictly to the Old Faith, did not smoke, would neither eat nor drink out of a vessel used by the Orthodox, and considered his oath sacred. In all his actions he was deliberately, firmly exact; and giving his whole attention to whatever his superiors set him to do, he never forgot it for a moment until he had done his duty as he understood it. Now he was ordered to escort two Polish women and two coffins to Sarátof, so that no evil should befall them on the way, and they were to travel quietly and not be up to any mischief; and at Sarátof he was to hand them over honourably to the Authorities.
And so he had brought them safely to Sarátof -- little dog, coffins and all. The women, though Poles, were harmless agreeable women, and they did nothing wrong. But here in the Pokróvsky suburb, towards evening, passing by the tarantass, he noticed that the little dog jumped inside and whined and wagged its tail, and he thought he heard someone's voice coming from under the seat of the tarantass. One of the Polish women -- the old one -- grew frightened on seeing the dog in the tarantass, and caught it and carried it away.
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