At that sound, Father Cassimer's countenance
fell for the first time. He knew the bellman was a poor half-witted
fellow, who would not be sensible of his absence; and then he turned
to have another shot at the wolves.
Shots were by this time getting scarce among us. There was not a man
had a charge left but old Wenzel, who had supplied us as long as he
could; but at length, loading his own gun with his last charge, he
laid it quietly in the corner, saying one didn't know what use might
be for it, and he never liked an empty gun.
Wenzel was the son of a small innkeeper at Grodno, but after his
father's decease, which occurred when he was a child, his mother had
married a Russian trader, who, when she died, carried the boy to
Moscow. There Wenzel bade fair to be brought up a Russian; but when a
stepmother came home, which took place while he was still a youth, he
had returned to his native country, built himself a hut in the woods
of Lithuania, and lived a lonely hunter till the time of my story,
when he was still a robust, though gray-haired man. Some said his
Muscovite parents had not been to his liking; some that he had found
cause to shoot a master to whom they apprenticed him at Moscow; but be
that as it might, Wenzel hated the Russians with all his heart, and
never scrupled to say that the gun which had served him so long would
serve the country too if it ever came to a rising.
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