You've got over all that nonsense, eh?' But Ivan never made any response to such remarks. So one day the master was driving with Ivan to the town in his three-horse sledge with bells and a highback covered with carpet. The horses began to walk up the hill, and Ivan got off the box-seat and went behind the back of the sledge as though he had dropped something. It was a sharp frost; the master sat wrapped up, with a beaver cap pulled down on to his ears. Then Ivan took an axe from under his skirt, came up to the master from behind, knocked off his cap, and saying, 'I warned you, Pietr Petrovitch—you've yourself to blame now!' he struck off his head at one blow. Then he stopped the ponies, put the cap on his dead master, and, getting on the box-seat again, drove him to the town, straight to the courts of justice.
'Here's the Suhinsky general for you, dead; I have killed him. As I told him, so I did to him. Put me in fetters.'
They took Ivan, tried him, sentenced him to the knout, and then to hard labour. The light-hearted, bird-like dancer was sent to the mines, and there passed out of sight for ever. . .
Yes; one can but repeat, in another sense, Alexey Sergeitch's words: 'They were good old times . . . but enough of them!'
- 1881.
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