op train? Why have you taken me off the troop
train?"

Getting no answer, the old man goes to the station. He looks first for
the familiar figure of the head guard and, not finding him, goes to
the station-master. The station-master is sitting at a table in his own
room, turning over a bundle of forms. He is busy, and affects not to
see the newcomer. His appearance is impressive: a cropped black head,
prominent ears, a long hooked nose, a swarthy face; he has a forbidding
and, as it were, offended expression. Malahin begins making his
complaint at great length.

"What?" queries the station-master. "How is this?" He leans against the
back of his chair and goes on, growing indignant: "What is it? and
why shouldn't you go by number eighteen? Speak more clearly, I don't
understand! How is it? Do you want me to be everywhere at once?"

He showers questions on him, and for no apparent reason grows
sterner and sterner. Malahin is already feeling in his pocket for his
pocketbook, but in the end the station-master, aggrieved and indignant,
for some unknown reason jumps up from his seat and runs out of the room.
Malahin shrugs his shoulders, and goes out to look for someone else to
speak to.

From boredom or from a desire to put the finishing stroke to a busy day,
or simply that a window with the inscription "Telegraph!" on it catches
his eye, he goes to the window and expresses a desire to send off a
telegram. Taking up a pen, he thinks for a moment, and writes on a blue
form: "Urgent. Traffic Manager. Eight vans of live stock. Delayed at
every station. Kindly send an express number. Reply paid. Malahin."

Having sent off the telegram, he goes back to the station-master's
room. There he finds, sitting on a sofa covered with gray cloth, a
benevolent-looking gentleman in spectacles and a cap of raccoon fur; he
is wearing a peculiar overcoat very much like a lady's, edged with fur,
with frogs and slashed sleeves. Another gentleman, dried-up and sinewy,
wearing the uniform of a railway inspector, stands facing him.

"Just think of it," says the inspector, addressing the gentleman in the
queer overcoat. "I'll tell you an incident that really is A1! The Z.
railway line in the coolest possible way stole three hundred trucks
from the N. line. It's a fact, sir! I swear it! They carried them off,
repainted them, put their letters on them, and that's all about it. The
N. line sends its agents everywhere, they hunt and hunt. And then-