peasant, and how the woman who was living with him had left her husband.
He saw her now sitting at the table in a rich dress, and looking very
hot as she drank her tea. With great condescension she asked Stepan to
have tea with her. No other travellers were stopping in the inn that
night. Stepan was given a place in the kitchen where he might sleep.
Matrena--that was the woman's name--cleared the table and went to her
room. Stepan went to lie down on the large stove in the kitchen, but
he could not sleep, and the wood splinters put on the stove to dry were
crackling under him, as he tossed from side to side. He could not help
thinking of his host's fat paunch protruding under the belt of his
shirt, which had lost its colour from having been washed ever so many
times. Would not it be a good thing to make a good clean incision in
that paunch. And that woman, too, he thought.

One moment he would say to himself, "I had better go from here
to-morrow, bother them all!" But then again Ivan Mironov came back
to his mind, and he went on thinking of the innkeeper's paunch and
Matrena's white throat bathed in perspiration. "Kill I must, and it must
be both!"

He heard the cock crow for the second time.

"I must do it at once, or dawn will be here." He had seen in the evening
before he went to bed a knife and an axe. He crawled down from the
stove, took the knife and axe, and went out of the kitchen door. At that
very moment he heard the lock of the entrance door open. The innkeeper
was going out of the house to the courtyard. It all turned out contrary
to what Stepan desired. He had no opportunity of using the knife;
he just swung the axe and split the innkeeper's head in two. The man
tumbled down on the threshold of the door, then on the ground.