:

"How horrible the blood smells! It would seem that my very foot is
smeared with it."

With a frown the fair-headed muzhik eyed him, while the foreman
returned the muzhik's gaze with a scrutiny that never wavered. Finally
the elder man commented with cold severity:

"All the mischief has come of vodka and tobacco, the devil's drugs."

Not only were the pair strangely alike, but both of them strangely
resembled wizards, in that both were short of stature, as
sharp-finished as gimlets, and as green-tinted by the darkness as tufts
of lichen.

"Let us go, brother," the foreman said. "Go we with the Holy Spirit."

And, omitting even to inquire who had been killed, or even to glance at
the corpse, or even to pay it the last salute demanded of custom, the
foreman departed down the stream, while in his wake followed the
messenger, a man who kept stumbling as he picked his way from stone to
stone. Amid the gloom the pair moved as silently as ghosts.

The narrow-chested, fair-headed little muzhik then raked me with his
eyes; whereafter he produced a cigarette from a tin box, snapped-to the
lid of the box, struck a match (illuminating once more the face of the
dead man), and applied the flame to the cigarette. Lastly he said:

"This is the sixth murder which I have seen one thing and another
commit."

"One thing and another commit?" I queried.

The reply came only after a pause; when the little muzhik asked: "What
did you say? I did not quite catch it."

I explained that human beings, not inanimate entities, murdered human
beings.

"Well, be they human beings or machinery or lightning or anything else,
they are all one. One of my mates was caught in some machinery at
Bakhmakh. Another one had his throat cut in a brawl. Another one was
crushed against the bucket in a coal mine. Another one was--"

Carefully though the man counted, he ended by erring in his reckoning
to the extent of making his total "five." Accordingly he re-computed
the list--and this time succeeded in making the total amount to "seven."

"Never mind," he remarked with a sigh as he blew his cigarette into a
red glow which illuminated the whole of his face. "The truth is that I
cannot always repeat the list correctly, just as I should like. Were I
older than I am, I too should contrive to get finished off; for old-age
is a far from desirable thing. Yes, indeed! But, as things are, I am
still alive, nor, thank the Lord, does anything matter very m