nd ran to get into the carriage.
"Skvoreshniki!"

The coachman said afterwards that his master urged him on all the way,
but as soon as they were getting near the mansion he suddenly told him
to turn and drive back to the town, bidding him "Drive fast; please
drive fast!" Before they reached the town wall "master told me to stop
again, got out of the carriage, and went across the road into the field;
I thought he felt ill but he stopped and began looking at the flowers,
and so he stood for a time. It was strange, really; I began to feel
quite uneasy." This was the coachman's testimony. I remember the weather
that morning: it was a cold, clear, but windy September day; before
Andrey Antonovitch stretched a forbidding landscape of bare fields from
which the crop had long been harvested; there were a few dying yellow
flowers, pitiful relics blown about by the howling wind. Did he want to
compare himself and his fate with those wretched flowers battered by the
autumn and the frost? I don't think so; in fact I feel sure it was
not so, and that he realised nothing about the flowers in spite of the
evidence of the coachman and of the police superintendent, who drove up
at that moment and asserted afterwards that he found the governor with
a bunch of yellow flowers in his hand. This police superintendent,
Flibusterov by name, was an ardent champion of authority who had only
recently come to our town but had already distinguished himself and
become famous by his inordinate zeal, by a certain vehemence in the
execution of his duties, and his inveterate inebriety. Jumping out of
the carriage, and not the least disconcerted at the sight of what the
governor was doing, he blurted out all in one breath, with a frantic
expression, yet with an air of conviction, that "There's an upset in the
town."

"Eh? What?" said Andrey Antonovitch, turning to him with a stern face,
but without a trace of surprise or any recollection of his carriage and
his coachman, as though he had been in his own study.

"Police-superintendent Flibusterov, your Excellency. There's a riot in
the town."

"Filibusters?" Andrey Antonovitch said thoughtfully.

"Just so, your Excellency. The Shpigulin men are making a riot."

"The Shpigulin men!..."

The name "Shpigulin" seemed to remind him of something. He started and
put his finger to his forehead: "The Shpigulin men!" In silence, and
still plunged in thought, he walked without haste to the carriage,
took h