holding his gown
over his chest.

After this the court proceeded hurriedly to the examination of
witnesses. Two peasant women and five men and the village policeman
who had made the enquiry were questioned. All of them, mud-bespattered,
exhausted with their long walk and waiting in the witnesses' room,
gloomy and dispirited, gave the same evidence. They testified that
Harlamov lived "well" with his old woman, like anyone else; that
he never beat her except when he had had a drop; that on the ninth
of June when the sun was setting the old woman had been found in
the porch with her skull broken; that beside her in a pool of blood
lay an axe. When they looked for Nikolay to tell him of the calamity
he was not in his hut or in the streets. They ran all over the
village, looking for him. They went to all the pothouses and huts,
but could not find him. He had disappeared, and two days later came
of his own accord to the police office, pale, with his clothes torn,
trembling all over. He was bound and put in the lock-up.

"Prisoner," said the president, addressing Harlamov, "cannot you
explain to the court where you were during the three days following
the murder?"

"I was wandering about the fields. . . . Neither eating nor drinking
. . . ."

"Why did you hide yourself, if it was not you that committed the
murder?

"I was frightened. . . . I was afraid I might be judged guilty. . . ."

"Aha! . . . Good, sit down!"

The last to be examined was the district doctor who had made a
post-mortem on the old woman. He told the court all that he remembered
of his report at the post-mortem and all that he had succeeded in
thinking of on his way to the court that morning. The president
screwed up his eyes at his new glossy black suit, at his foppish
cravat, at his moving lips; he listened and in his mind the languid
thought seemed to spring up of itself:

"Everyone wears a short jacket nowadays, why has he had his made
long? Why long and not short?"

The circumspect creak of boots was audible behind the president's
back. It was the assistant prosecutor going up to the table to take
some papers.

"Mihail Vladimirovitch," said the assistant prosecutor, bending
down to the president's ear, "amazingly slovenly the way that
Koreisky conducted the investigation. The prisoner's brother was
not examined, the village elder was not examined, there's no making
anything out of his description of the hut. . . ."

"It can't be helped,