walk in the city, gentlemen; or
perhaps some of you would like to go to the village?"

"Satan!"

But Yanson had stopped laughing, and was now winking cunningly.

"You had better look out!" said the warden, with an indefinite threat,
and he walked away, glancing back of him.

Yanson was calm and cheerful throughout the evening. He repeated to
himself, "I shall not be hanged," and it seemed to him so convincing,
so wise, so irrefutable, that it was unnecessary to feel uneasy. He had
long forgotten about his crime, only sometimes he regretted that he had
not been successful in attacking his master's wife. But he soon forgot
that, too.

Every morning Yanson asked when he was to be hanged, and every morning
the warden answered him angrily:

"Take your time, you devil! Wait!" and he would walk off quickly before
Yanson could begin to laugh.

And from these monotonously repeated words, and from the fact that each
day came, passed and ended as every ordinary day had passed, Yanson
became convinced that there would be no execution. He began to lose
all memory of the trial, and would roll about all day long on his cot,
vaguely and happily dreaming about the white melancholy fields, with
their snow-mounds, about the refreshment bar at the railroad station,
and about other things still more vague and bright. He was well fed in
the prison, and somehow he began to grow stout rapidly and to assume
airs.

"Now she would have liked me," he thought of his master's wife. "Now I
am stout--not worse-looking than the master." But he longed for a drink
of vodka, to drink and to take a ride on horseback, to ride fast, madly.

When the terrorists were arrested the news of it reached the prison.
And in answer to Yanson's usual question, the warden said eagerly and
unexpectedly:

"It won't be long now!"

He looked at Yanson calmly with an air of importance and repeated:

"It won't be long now. I suppose in about a week."

Yanson turned pale, and as though falling asleep, so turbid was the look
in his glassy eyes, asked:

"Are you joking?"

"First you could not wait, and now you think I am joking. We are not
allowed to joke here. You like to joke, but we are not allowed to," said
the warden with dignity as he went away.

Toward evening of that day Yanson had already grown thinner. His skin,
which had stretched out and had become smooth for a time, was suddenly
covered with a multitude of small wrinkles, and in places it seeme