A Night Conversation by Ivan Bunin

Ivan, as always, maintained a portentous silence. Kiriushka was not at all interested in whatever they were talking about; he lay thinking his own thoughts -- mostly about an accordion, the purchase of which was his most cherished dream. Theodot, too, who lay leaning upon his elbow, was silent for a long while. He was a strong, flat-chested muzhik, who at the beginning of the summer had not been considered by the farm hands as one of them, because he wore a short sheepskin coat, without a waistline and without folds in its skirts -- which was the kind worn by the Tartars of Kazan. He had seemed a stranger to the schoolboy as well. Just as he liked the cheerful composure of Pashka, the smoothness of his mannerisms, his sunburned face, so he was not disposed to intimacy by the face of Theodot, also calm but devoid of any expression, large, ashen-gray, wrinkled, with sparse moustaches, always wet from the slavering caused by his pipe; his whitish, weather-beaten lips were turned considerably outward. Theodot was listening attentively, but did not put in a single word during Pashka's narrative -- only now and then he would give a consumptive cough and spit into the straw. And at first the conversation was sustained only by the dumbfounded schoolboy and the old man.

"What are you lyin' about nothin' at all for? " said the old man indifferently, upon hearing the boastful declaration of Pashka. "What sort of a man could you have killed? Where?"