The Tricks Failed

Three persons, two men and one woman, appeared in the village of Kruty Bereh in Haradzieja gmina, Nyasvizh county. They declared themselves chiromancers (fortune-tellers), took lodgings and said they would stay here the whole summer. They even showed their documents. And what turned out? The documents were issued by the Nyasvizh Starosta. The lads at once figured out that these must be false fortune-tellers. They told fortunes only in the evening and received only one person at a time, taking 3 million as payment.

So one girl, A. M., dressed up as an already middle-aged woman and went to find out whether these were genuine soothsayers. Their fortune-telling went quite badly and clumsily. During the session the girl began to recall where she had seen this man. Then at last she remembered that he was a detective who had searched her place in the winter. After her no one else went to the soothsayers, and at 12 o'clock at night these guests vanished, having earned nothing. Before the girl they had told fortunes to only two lads, whom they steered into conversation with "czy służył w wojsku rosyjskim, czy kocha Białoruś, czy walczył-by za Polskę" (whether he had served in the Russian army, whether he loves Belarus, whether he would fight for Poland), and so on.

Such are the sheep these wolf-cubs pretend to be, and perhaps somewhere they manage to fleece trusting peasants, who already pay a great deal in taxes, including for the upkeep of all sorts of spies.