"You had better look out!" said the warden, with an indefinite threat,
and he walked away, glancing back of him.

Yanson was calm and cheerful throughout the evening. He repeated to
himself, "I shall not be hanged," and it seemed to him so convincing,
so wise, so irrefutable, that it was unnecessary to feel uneasy. He
had long forgotten about his crime, only sometimes he regretted that
he had not been successful in attacking his master's wife. But he soon
forgot that, too.

Every morning Yanson asked when he was to be hanged, and every morning
the warden answered him angrily:

"Take your time, you devil! Wait!" and he would walk off quickly
before Yanson could begin to laugh.

And from these monotonously repeated words, and from the fact that
each day came, passed and ended as every ordinary day had passed,
Yanson became convinced that there would be no execution. He began to
lose all memory of the trial, and would roll about all day long on his
cot, vaguely and happily dreaming about the white melancholy fields,
with their snow-mounds, about the refreshment bar at the railroad
station, and about other things still more vague and bright. He was
well fed in the prison, and somehow he began to grow stout rapidly and
to assume airs.

"Now she would have liked me," he thought of his master's wife. "Now I
am stout-not worse-looking than the master." But he longed for a drink
of vodka, to drink and to take a ride on horseback, to ride fast,
madly.