V + 

There was a silence. Theodot raised himself up to a sitting posture, and, bending down, spreading his hands, began slowly to unwind the cords with which his old, constantly falling foot-cloths were tied up. And a minute later the schoolboy with horror and repulsion saw that which he had seen so many times before with perfect calmness: a muzhik’s bare foot, dead-white, enormous, flat, with a monstrously grown great toe lying crookedly on top of the others, and the thin, hairy skin, which Theodot, having unwound and dropped the footcloth, began to scratch hard in a delectable fury, tearing it with his nails, as strong as those of a beast. Having scratched his fill and wriggled his toes, he took the foot-cloth with both hands⁠—it was hardened, bent, and blackened at the heel and sole, just as though it had been rubbed with black wax⁠—and shook it out, spreading an unbearable stench upon the fresh breeze. “Yes, murder means nothing to him!” reflected the student, shivering. “That is the foot of a real murderer! How horribly he killed this beautiful she-goat! And the man that he killed with a whetstone⁠ ⁠… he must have been sharpening a scythe⁠ ⁠… and must have struck him straight in the temple, killing him on the stop.⁠ ⁠… But Pashka!⁠ ⁠… Pashka!⁠ ⁠… How could he tell about it so gaily and with such enjoyment, too! ‘It came right out at his back!’ ” + 

Suddenly, without raising his head, Ivan began speaking morosely: + 

“Fools are beaten even at the altar. Why, Postnii, it wouldn’t be half-enough to beat you to death for this here she-goat. What did you go and kill her for? You should have sold it. What sort of a husbandman do you call yourself after that, you durn ninny, when you don’t understand that a muzhik can’t get along without livestock? It should be valued. If I only had a she-goat, now.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He didn’t finish his sentence, was silent for a while, then suddenly grinned. + 

“There was an affair in Stanova, now; well that really was something.⁠ ⁠… It wasn’t worse than your goat, now; a landowner by the name of Mussin was keeping a wild bull. This bull just wouldn’t let anybody pass; he gored two young cowherds to death. They’d fasten him up with a chain, but still he’d tear loose and go off. Just the very same way, too, like your goat, he’d trample the peasants’ grain; but no one dared to chase him off: they were afraid, and would walk a mile around him. Well, of course, they sawed off his horns, gelded him.⁠ ⁠… He quieted down a bit. Only the muzhiks scored up everything against him. When these here riots began, here’s what they did: they caught him in the field, tied him up with ropes, threw him off his feet.⁠ ⁠… They didn’t beat him at all, but just took and stripped him to the last hair. So, all bare, he dashed into the owner’s yard⁠—he ran in at full speed, fell all in a heap, and died right on the spot⁠—losing all his blood.” + 

“How?” asked the schoolboy; “they took his hide off? While he was alive?” + 

“No, while he was cooked,” mumbled Ivan. “Oh you Moscow city feller!” + 

Everybody started laughing; while Pashka, laughing more than all of them, quickly picked up the conversation. + 

“Well, there’s a lot of murderers for you! And you was saying, just like that, that we ought to be treated kindly. No brother, guess you can’t get along here without us marching soldiers! When after the Seniyaks we was stationed at Kursk, now, we was also restoring order in a certain settlement. The muzhiks had gotten it into their head to ruinate an owner.⁠ ⁠… And the owner, they do say, was a good sort, at that.⁠ ⁠… Well, the whole settlement went for him, and, naturally, the women tagged along. The watchmen came out to meet the villagers. The peasants went for them with stakes and scythes. The guards fired one volley, and then, of course, took to their heels: what the devil sort of strength can you expect from those dunderheads!⁠—but one bullet did get a baby in a woman’s arms. The woman was left alive, but he, of course, didn’t even let out a squeak⁠—just gave one jerk with his little legs. So, good Lord!” said Pashka, tossing his head from laughter and seating himself more comfortably, “what only didn’t the muzhiks do! They broke everything to smash and smithereens; chased this same owner into a corner, trampling him down, while this muzhik, the father of this here child, ran up to that very spot with this same baby; he was all gasping and crazed from grief, and he starts in to beat the owner over his head with this dead baby! Grabbed him by the little legs and starts in lambasting the owner. And then the others fall upon him, and, of course, all for one and one for all, they finished him. We were rushed up, but he was already beginning to rot when we got there.” + 

“Well, what are you laughing about, you fool!” the schoolboy wanted to cry out, suddenly feeling a ferocious hatred for Pashka’s laughter, for Pashka’s voice. But here Kiriushka suddenly stirred, and, raising his head, said with childish naiveness: + 

“But that which took place when Kochergin the landowner was bein’ wrecked⁠—that was something awful! I was then living with him as one of his shepherds.⁠ ⁠… So all their mirrors was thrown into the pond.⁠ ⁠… Afterwards, people from the village would come over for a swim, and would always be pulling them out of the slime.⁠ ⁠… You’d dive, stand up⁠—and then your foot would just slide over a mirror.⁠ ⁠… And this, now⁠ ⁠… how do you call it⁠ ⁠… fortopianner was dragged into the rye.⁠ ⁠… We used to come.⁠ ⁠…” Kiriushka raised himself up, and, laughing, leant back on his elbows; “we would come and there it would be standing.⁠ ⁠… You’d take a club, and start banging upon it⁠—upon its keys, that is.⁠ ⁠… From one end to the other.⁠ ⁠… Why, it would play better nor any accordion!” + 

Everybody laughed once more. Theodot had adjusted his footgear, had again crisscrossed his foot-cloths accurately with the cords, and, having set himself to rights, had resumed his former position. And, having waited for a moment of silence, he began to finish his story in measured tones: + 

“Yes, he gave me one on the ear, and yet put in a suit as well.⁠ ⁠… For all these, now, losses and damages, for the forage, that is. He was called Andrei Bogdanov⁠—Andrei Ivannov Bogdanov. A tall muzhik, he was⁠—red-faced, thin, always evil-tempered, always drunk. Well, now, so he started a suit. It was he that had warmed my ear, and he it was that was suing me to boot. Here the busiest time of the year came along, with nary a breathing space; but I’ve got to be hiking off fifteen miles away.⁠ ⁠… I guess that’s just what the Lord must have punished him for.⁠ ⁠…” + 

As he gazed at the straw, stifling his cough and wiping his flat lips with the palm of his hand, Theodot’s speech was becoming more and more sombre, more and more expressive. Having said “The Lord must have punished him,” he was silent for a while, and then went on: + 

“The suit, of course, came to nothing. A peace was patched up between us. We was both at fault, that is. But only he wasn’t content with that. He made up with me, but right after he walked away, drank till he was blind-drunk, started threatening to kill me. He yells before everybody: ‘Wait,’ says he, ‘wait, I ain’t drunk yet, now; but when I’ve drunk enough I’ll settle your hash.’ I wanted to get away from the mixup⁠—it made me feel sick in the stomach.⁠ ⁠… Then he took to coming to our village: he’d come under my windows, drunk as drunk could be, and would start in to curse me out, saying things about my mother. And I have a grownup daughter.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“That weren’t right,” sympathetically grunted out the old man, and yawned. + 

“Oh, it was a grand story!” said Theodot. “Well, now, so he comes on an evening before the Kiriki. I hear him making a hubbub in the street. I got up, without saying a word, went out into the yard, sat down on a harrow, and started sharpening a scythe. But I was taken with such a rage that I saw red before my eyes. Then I hear him walking up to the hut, raising a rumpus. Must be wanting to break the panes, thinks I to myself. But no; he just made a lot of noise and was already going somewhere else. That would have been the end of it perhaps⁠—if only Ollka, my daughter, hadn’t jumped out⁠ ⁠… And then she starts in yelling, with a voice not her own: ‘Help, father, Andrushka is beating me!’ I dashed out with the scythe whetstone in my hand⁠—and, all in a passion, hit him once right over his head! He just hit the ground. Folks ran up, started dousing him with water⁠ ⁠… but he lies there, and by now he’s only hiccuping.⁠ ⁠… Maybe something might have been done then.⁠ ⁠… Like putting a cold pack on him, or something like that.⁠ ⁠… He ought to have been carried off to a hospital as fast as possible, and a tenner should have been handed to the doctor.⁠ ⁠… But where was a tenner to be gotten? Well, so he hiccuped and he hiccuped, and he passed away toward night. He threshed about and threshed about; then turned over on his back, stretched himself out, and there he was, all ready. And the folks were standing around, looking, all silent. And the lights was already lit by that time.” + 

All atremble with a quick shivering, his face flaming, the high school student got up, and, sinking in the straw up to his waist, started climbing down the stack. A borzoi bitch, frightened by him, suddenly jumped up and gave a jerky bark. The student drew back sharply, falling into the straw, and stood stock still. The chill wind was rustling; a cluster of chill autumn stars showed white above his very head, while from beyond the hillock of rustling straw came the measured, low-pitched voice of Theodot. + 

“I sat in the barn for two days under guard, and saw the whole thing through a little window.⁠ ⁠… How they cut him up, that is. The people flocked in from all the villages, to have a look at this murdered man⁠—and me too, for that matter. They used to shove their way right up to the very barn. Two benches was carried out on the common, placed right near the barn, and the murdered man put upon them. A log of wood was put under his head; chairs and a table were brought out for the coroner and the sawbones. The sawbones walks up to him; he tears off his shirt, tears off his drawers⁠—and I see a corpse lying all naked, already stiff; yellow here and green there, while his face was all like wax; the red beard had become thin, and simply stood out. The sawbones put a burdock over you know what place. Right at hand, as usual, there was a box with all sorts of contraptions. The sawbones walks up, parts his hair from ear to ear, makes a cut, and begins to take off the scalp together with the hair, in halves. Where it was thin, he scraped with a little knife. He tore away a half to either side⁠—soon as he gets one piece off, he pulls it down over the eye. The whole skull became visible⁠—like some kind of a little pot, it was.⁠ ⁠… And there’s a black spot on it, near the right ear⁠—black clotted blood; where the blow had come, that is. The sawbones says something to the coroner, and the coroner writes: ‘Three cracks on such and such parts.’ Then the sawbones starts in sawing through the skull all around. The saw don’t work, so he takes a little hammer and a small chisel, see, and goes over the marks that he’d made with the saw, breaking through with the little chisel. And the top of the skull just fell away, like a cup⁠—the brain was all plain to be seen.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“What don’t they do, the murdering cutthroats!” hoarsely remarked the old man, who had just dozed off. + 

But Theodot was firmly finishing his say: + 

“Then he took out a heavy knife, and starts cutting the chest, right through the gristle. He hacks out a three cornered piece, and starts pulling it away⁠—it even started cracking.⁠ ⁠… All the stomach came to view, and the blue lungs, and all the innards.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Deafened by the beating of his own heart, the student got up on his feet, standing up to the full of his great height⁠—in his cap, shoved back on the nape of his neck, in his light uniform overcoat, which was already too short for him. Gray, huge, dreadful in his Mongolian calmness, Theodot was speaking in measured tones, his pipe gripped between his teeth; but the student was no longer listening to him. With all his eyes he was looking at all these men⁠—so familiar and yet so unknown, so incomprehensible⁠—who had made his whole soul so sick on this night. Pitiful in his vice and his meekness, in all his pastoral primitiveness, Kiriushka was sleeping, covered with his great coat, one thick leg, swathed in white foot-cloths, and twisted at the knee, sticking out from underneath it. Ivan, too, was sleeping; Ivan of the morose, disdainful face, whose mother, a horrible, black old woman, had been dying for three years now, in his black mud hut, standing near the ditches at the edge of the bare village, in the darkness and the dirt, underneath the low ceiling, underneath the low roof of sods, and yet cannot in anyway die, to her grief; while his buck-toothed thin wife feeds at her dark-yellow, hanging dry breast a bare-bellied, clear-eyed child, with its nose running, and its lips bitten into blood by the countless flies in the hut. The happy Pashka was sleeping his heavy, healthy sleep in the fresh wind, in his soldier’s cap, heavy boots, and his new short coat. As for Khomut, the old man, who has not got even a short coat (he has only a long coat, frayed and with a large hole through the shoulder), whose drawers always hung so low upon his flabby thighs⁠—he was sitting with his back to the wind, bareheaded, stripped to the waist. He, senilely emaciated, yellow of body, with his shoulders elevated at a slant, with his twisted prominent backbone glistening in the light of the stars, was sitting with his big tousled head, ruffled by the fresh wind, bowed down, bending his neck which was already scrawny and all in coarse wrinkles. He was intently examining the shirt he had taken off, and, as he listened to Theodot, he would at times squeeze its collar band between his thumbnails. + 

The student jumped down upon the hard and smooth autumnal earth, and, stooping, quickly walked toward the dark, murmurous garden, toward home. + 

All three dogs also arose, and, showing dimly white, started running sideways after him, with their tails curled tightly. + 