A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 2 eBook

He had made up his mind to kill Malek-Adel; he had thought of nothing else the whole day....  Now he had made up his mind!

He went out to do this thing not only calmly, but confidently, unhesitatingly, as a man going about something from a sense of duty.  This ‘job’ seemed a very ‘simple’ thing to him; in making an end of the impostor, he was quits with ‘everyone’ at once—­he punished himself for his stupidity, and made expiation to his real darling, and showed the whole world (Tchertop-hanov worried himself a great deal about the ‘whole world’) that he was not to be trifled with....  And, above all, he was making an end of himself too with the impostor—­for what had he to live for now?  How all this took shape in his brain, and why, it seemed to him so simple—­it is not easy to explain, though not altogether impossible; stung to the quick, solitary, without a human soul near to him, without a halfpenny, and with his blood on fire with vodka, he was in a state bordering on madness, and there is no doubt that even in the absurdest freaks of mad people there is, to their eyes, a sort of logic, and even justice.  Of his justice Tchertop-hanov was, at any rate, fully persuaded; he did not hesitate, he made haste to carry out sentence on the guilty without giving himself any clear definition of whom he meant by that term....  To tell the truth, he reflected very little on what he was about to do.  ‘I must, I must make an end,’ was what he kept stupidly and severely repeating to himself; ‘I must make an end!’

And the guiltless guilty one followed in a submissive trot behind his back....  But there was no pity for him in Tchertop-hanov’s heart.

XV

Not far from the forest to which he was leading his horse there stretched a small ravine, half overgrown with young oak bushes.  Tchertop-hanov went down into it....  Malek-Adel stumbled and almost fell on him.

‘So you would crush me, would you, you damned brute!’ shouted Tchertop-hanov, and, as though in self-defence, he pulled the pistol out of his pocket.  He no longer felt furious exasperation, but that special numbness of the senses which they say comes over a man before the perpetration of a crime.  But his own voice terrified him—­it sounded so wild and strange under the cover of dark branches in the close, decaying dampness of the forest ravine!  Moreover, in response to his exclamation, some great bird suddenly fluttered in a tree-top above his head...  Tchertop-hanov shuddered.  He had, as it were, roused a witness to his act—­and where?  In that silent place where he should not have met a living creature....

‘Away with you, devil, to the four winds of heaven!’ he muttered, and letting go Malek-Adel’s rein, he gave him a violent blow on the shoulder with the butt end of the pistol.  Malek-Adel promptly turned back, clambered out of the ravine... and ran away.  But the thud of his hoofs was not long audible.  The rising wind confused and blended all sounds together.