ussian struck me I should not be here now. It was all done in a moment.
You see I was on the road when his sledge came along. The snow was fresh
and soft, and I did not hear it coming. The horses swerved, nearly
upsetting the sledge, and knocking me down in the snow. Then I got up
and swore at the driver, and then the Russian, who was angry because the
sledge had nearly been upset, jumped out, caught the whip from the
driver and struck me across the face. It hurt me badly, for my face was
cold. I had been in the wood shooting squirrels, and I hardly know how
it was, but I fitted an arrow to the string and shot. It was all over in
a moment, and there he lay on the snow with the arrow through his
throat. I was so frightened that I did not even try to run away, and was
stupid enough to let the driver hold me till some people came up and
carried me off to prison; so you see my shooting did me harm. But it was
hard to be sent here for life for a thing like that. He was a bad man
that Russian. He was an officer in one of the regiments there, and a
soldier who was in prison with me afterwards told me that there was
great joy among the soldiers when he was killed."

"But it was very wrong, Luka, to kill a man like that."

"Yes; but then you see I hadn't time to think. I was almost mad with
pain, and it was all done in a minute. I think it is very hard that I
should be punished as much as I am when there are many here who have
killed five or six people, or more, and some of them women, and they
have no worse punishment than I have. Look at Kobylin; he was a bandit
first of all, as I have heard him say over and over again. He beat his
wife to death, because she scolded him for being drunk, then he took to
the woods. The first he killed was a Jew pedlar, then he burnt down the
house of the head-man of a village because he had put the police on his
track. He killed him as he rushed out from the door, and his wife and
children were burnt alive. He killed four or five others on the road,
and when he was betrayed, as he was asleep in the hut, he cut down with
an axe two of the policemen who came to arrest him. He is in for life,
but he is a great deal worse than I am, is he not?

"Then there is that little Koshkin, the man who is always walking about
smiling to himself. He was a clerk to a notary, and he murdered his
master and mistress and two servant women, and got away with the money
and lived on it for a year; then he went into a