the Lord spared me," sighed the old man, "but folks
told me so. It is no great wonder... the Evil One will begin whistling
in a stone if he wants to. Before the Day of Freedom a rock was humming
for three days and three nights in our parts. I heard it myself. The
pike laughed because Yefim caught a devil instead of a pike."

The old man remembered something. He got up quickly on to his knees and,
shrinking as though from the cold, nervously thrusting his hands into
his sleeves, he muttered in a rapid womanish gabble:

"Lord save us and have mercy upon us! I was walking along the river bank
one day to Novopavlovka. A storm was gathering, such a tempest it was,
preserve us Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven.... I was hurrying on as best I
could, I looked, and beside the path between the thorn bushes--the thorn
was in flower at the time--there was a white bullock coming along. I
wondered whose bullock it was, and what the devil had sent it there for.
It was coming along and swinging its tail and moo-oo-oo! but would you
believe it, friends, I overtake it, I come up close--and it's not a
bullock, but Yefim--holy, holy, holy! I make the sign of the cross while
he stares at me and mutters, showing the whites of his eyes; wasn't I
frightened! We came alongside, I was afraid to say a word to him--the
thunder was crashing, the sky was streaked with lightning, the willows
were bent right down to the water--all at once, my friends, God strike
me dead that I die impenitent, a hare ran across the path... it ran and
stopped, and said like a man: 'Good-evening, peasants.' Lie down, you
brute!" the old man cried to the shaggy dog, who was moving round the
horse again. "Plague take you!"

"It does happen," said the overseer, still leaning on the saddle and not
stirring; he said this in the hollow, toneless voice in which men speak
when they are plunged in thought.

"It does happen," he repeated, in a tone of profundity and conviction.

"Ugh, he was a nasty old fellow," the old shepherd went on with somewhat
less fervour. "Five years after the Freedom he was flogged by the
commune at the office, so to show his spite he took and sent the throat
illness upon all Kovyli. Folks died out of number, lots and lots of
them, just as in cholera...."

"How did he send the illness?" asked the young shepherd after a brief
silence.

"We all know how, there is no great cleverness needed where there is
a will to it. Yefim murdered people with viper's f