ly away and I should be left alone.

As if in answer to my thoughts a desperate scream suddenly came from the
yard:

"Mur-der!"

It was a shrill female voice, and exactly as though it were trying to
imitate it, the wind also howled dismally in the chimney. Half a minute
passed and again it came through the sound of the wind, but as though
from the other end of the yard:

"Mur-der!"

"Misail, did you hear that?" said my wife in a hushed voice. "Did you
hear?"

She came out of the bedroom in her nightgown, with her hair down, and
stood listening and staring out of the dark window.

"Somebody is being murdered!" she muttered. "It only wanted that!"

I took my gun and went out; it was very dark outside; a violent wind was
blowing so that it was hard to stand up. I walked to the gate and
listened; the trees were moaning; the wind went whistling through them,
and in the garden the idiot's dog was howling. Beyond the gate it was
pitch dark; there was not a light on the railway. And just by the wing,
where the offices used to be, I suddenly heard a choking cry:

"Mur-der!"

"Who is there?" I called.

Two men were locked in a struggle. One had nearly thrown the other, who
was resisting with all his might. And both were breathing heavily.

"Let go!" said one of them and I recognised Ivan Cheprakov. It was he
who had cried out in a thin, falsetto voice. "Let go, damn you, or I'll
bite your hands!"

The other man I recognised as Moissey. I parted them and could not
resist hitting Moissey in the face twice. He fell down, then got up, and
I struck him again.

"He tried to kill me," he muttered. "I caught him creeping to his
mother's drawer.... I tried to shut him up in the wing for safety."

Cheprakov was drunk and did not recognise me. He stood gasping for
breath as though trying to get enough wind to shriek again.

I left them and went back to the house. My wife was lying on the bed,
fully dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard and did not keep
back the fact that I had struck Moissey.

"Living in the country is horrible," she said. "And what a long night it
is!"

"Mur-der!" we heard again, a little later.

"I'll go and part them," I said.

"No. Let them kill each other," she said with an expression of disgust.

She lay staring at the ceiling, listening, and I sat near her, not
daring to speak and feeling that it was my fault that screams of
"murder" came from the yard and the night was so long