take the bottom stone out . . . I came across it when I was looking for a place to hide a bottle from your mother. You take the stone out, and then you can take some more out, from above the first one . . . Crawl in there, don’t be afraid. It’s a secret passage. After that, it’s easy: you just keep going . . . And you come out into the chamber where the treasure is. The important thing is, don’t be frightened . . .’ His voice had gone really quiet now, and Senka had to lean over him – the hiccups made it hard for him to listen properly too. ‘The treasure . . . There’s so much of it . . . It will all be yours. Live a good life. Don’t think too badly of your old dad . . .’
Siniukhin didn’t say anything else. Senka looked at him: his lips were set in a wide smile, but he wasn’t breathing any more. He’d passed over.
Senka crossed himself and reached out to the departed, like you were supposed to, to close his eyes, then jerked his hand away.
He wasn’t hiccuping any more, but he was trembling silently. And not from fear – he’d forgotten all about that.
Treasure! So much treasure!
HOW SENKA HUNTED FOR
TREASURE
Now of course, he was shaken up, after something like that.
He kept thinking: There’s a monster on the loose, he didn’t even spare the little baby, cut his eyes out too, the fiend! And what does that make the Prince! If he’s supposed to be an honest bandit, why does he keep a villain who gouges people’s eyes out when they’re still alive?
But his thoughts kept skipping from these terrible things to the treasure. He couldn’t imagine it properly, though: it was like the Holy Gate in the icon screen in church. With everything sparkling and shimmering, so you couldn’t make anything out. He imagined chests too, full of gold and silver, and all sorts of precious stones.
But then his thoughts turned to his brother Vanka, and how Senka would go to see him and give him a present – not a wooden horse with a string tail, and not some dwarf pony, like Judge Kuvshinnikov did, but a genuine thoroughbred Arab racer, and a carriage on springs to go with it.
And he thought about Death a bit too – well, of course he did. If Senka had all these huge riches, maybe she’d see him differently then. Not some gap-toothed, freckly kid, not a gnat or a swift, but Semyon Trifonovich Spidorov, a substantial squire. And then . . .
He didn’t really know what came ‘then’.
When he left that hideous room he ran back to the first cellar, with the fat-bellied pillars – that had to be the one Siniukhin was talking about.
Last pillar ‘on the right’ – was that this end or the other?
Probably the other, the one farthest from Siniukhin’s place
Senka was feeling a bit squiffy after everything that had happened, but he’d still grabbed the matches and a supply of splints off the table.
In the far corner he squatted down on his haunches and struck a match. He saw the dressed stonework of an ancient wall, every stone the size of a crate. Just try shifting one of those!
When the flame went out, Senka felt for the joint, tried pushing this way and that – a dead loss. He tried moving the next stone too –the same thing.
Right. He went over to the next corner on the right. This time he lit a splint, not just a match, and moved the light this way and that. The stones here looked the same, but one, at the bottom, was surrounded by black cracks. Was he in business?
He grabbed hold and pulled. The stone yielded, and quite easily too.
He tugged it out with a grunt and pushed it aside. The hole gave out a smell of damp and decay.
Senka started to shake again. Siniukhin was telling the truth! There was something there!
The next stone was even easier to get out – and a bit broader than the one underneath. The third was broader still, and it wasn’t held in by mortar either. He took out five stones altogether. The top one must have weighed seventy-five pounds, if not more.
Now Senka was peering into a narrow gap – a man could quite easily get through it if he turned sideways and bent crooked.
So he crossed himself and clambered in.
Once he’d