– And you be silent! – angrily the militiaman told. – Do not force down. I ask, a hand whose? Perhaps, here the smertoubiystvo occurred. Perhaps to the person the hand was cut off, and he without hand goes now and looks for where a hand.
– Good gracious! – Tarasovna began to wail. – Well, as will come yes here will shout: «Give my hand!»
– Here that and it. It, citizens, not a joke, but a crime under the article of the Criminal code. Where your summer resident Wagner?
– In Moscow. Today has to be.
– Here we will arrest him and we will remove interrogation from it. From where it got a human hand and on what code operates it? To stop a grinding! Illegally.
– Ah, fathers! – again Tarasovna screamed. Now she bitterly regretted the curiosity, and it is even more in what in a temper stirred up about the hand which frightened her. – Unless you will stop it? Shout at it do not shout – will not hear, there are no ears. Twists and twists.
– Well and let twists, and do not fill up grain.
Talking loudly, all left a mill. I remained to look what will be done by Tarasovna. She did not dare to disobey an administration order did not fill up grain in a funnel any more. But she regretted a hand which now in vain a millstone spit or maybe it was a pity for millstones, and Tarasovna stopped work of a hand, having turned a rychazhok on a box.
– You did affairs! – I told Tarasovna, becoming angry about her for the fact that her curiosity and garrulity will give now a lot of trouble to Wagner. I for a minute did not doubt that Wagner did not commit any crime.
– You did! – she answered with irritation. – All mill was befouled! Here and people speak: devil’s mill.
The chairman of the Village Council and the militiaman returned with the press and sealing wax. The militiaman remembered that measures to protection of traces of crime are not taken.
– Ceased to grind? – the militiaman asked.
– Poshabashila – Tarasovna answered.
The chairman set the seal to doors of a box in which there was a hand, and Tarasovna awfully was afraid that the chairman did not burn a mill. But everything was safely. The second seal was set to a mill door.
I met halfway on Wagner Road, intending to warn him about events of day. However my maneuver was not successful. The militiaman called to me and suggested to return. Anything else did not remain to me how to go to a garden and to continue the interrupted reading.
The village worried and hooted as an alarmed beehive. All with impatience expected Wagner’s arrival, and he forced itself to expect long enough. Already began to get dark when the boys guarding on the road cried:
– Goes! Goes!
All hurried on the road. Wagner really drove up to us. But on what crew! Imagine the long office table covered with the cloth which is going down to the earth. Above at the edges «table» is fenced with a board or iron wall of centimeters fifty height. It, obviously, was also that «samobezhka» about which Wagner spoke to me.
Because of the mountain the gray cloud rose. Wind twisted small tornadoes of dust on the road. The rain, long ago zhdanny Tarasovna came.
– Sit down! – Wagner shouted, having seen me. It stopped the extraordinary cart, I jumped and took seat near it. At this time the crowd, predvoditelstvuyemy the chairman of the Village Council, already approached a samobezhka.
