The merchant stopped, and a single man cautiously approached.

"Come up, my good friend," said the merchant; "sit here by me." The stranger politely took off his cap, and swung himself up to the driving-box.

He turned out to be the chief krakuse of the day before--the man with the drooping mustache.
"Keep an eye on him," said the merchant in English to Anton; "he shall serve us as a safe-conduct, and be paid for it too; but if he touches me, lay hold of him from behind." Anton took his despised pistols out of an old leathern pouch on one side of the carriage, and, in sight of the krakuse, arranged them ostentatiously in the pocket of his paletot.

But the latter only smiled, and soon showed himself a creature of a friendly and social nature, nodding confidentially to both travelers, drinking some mouthfuls out of Anton's traveling flask, trying to keep up, over his left shoulder, a conversation with him, calling him "your grace" in broken German, and giving him to understand that he too smoked, though he did not happen to have any tobacco.

At last he requested the honor of driving the gentlemen.
In this manner they passed a group of fallen houses, which lay on a flat close to a marsh, looking like giant fungi that had shot up on a malarian soil, when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by a band of insurgents.