trange fact had come to light. On the very outskirts of the quarter,
on a piece of waste land beyond the kitchen gardens, not less than fifty
paces from any other buildings, there stood a little wooden house which
had only lately been built, and this solitary house had been on fire at
the very beginning, almost before any other. Even had it burnt down, it
was so far from other houses that no other building in the town could
have caught fire from it, and, vice versa, if the whole riverside
had been burnt to the ground, that house might have remained intact,
whatever the wind had been. It followed that it had caught fire
separately and independently and therefore not accidentally. But the
chief point was that it was not burnt to the ground, and at daybreak
strange things were discovered within it. The owner of this new house,
who lived in the neighbourhood, rushed up as soon as he saw it in flames
and with the help of his neighbours pulled apart a pile of faggots which
had been heaped up by the side wall and set fire to. In this way he
saved the house. But there were lodgers in the house--the captain, who
was well known in the town, his sister, and their elderly servant, and
these three persons--the captain, his sister, and their servant--had
been murdered and apparently robbed in the night. (It was here that the
chief of police had gone while Lembke was rescuing the feather bed.)

By morning the news had spread and an immense crowd of all classes, even
the riverside people who had been burnt out had flocked to the waste
land where the new house stood. It was difficult to get there, so dense
was the crowd. I was told at once that the captain had been found lying
dressed on the bench with his throat cut, and that he must have been
dead drunk when he was killed, so that he had felt nothing, and he had
"bled like a bull"; that his sister Marya Timofeyevna had been "stabbed
all over" with a knife and she was lying on the floor in the doorway, so
that probably she had been awake and had fought and struggled with the
murderer. The servant, who had also probably been awake, had her skull
broken. The owner of the house said that the captain had come to see him
the morning before, and that in his drunken bragging he had shown him a
lot of money, as much as two hundred roubles. The captain's shabby old
green pocket-book was found empty on the floor, but Marya Timofeyevna's
box had not been touched, and the silver setting of the ikon