"Well, that finishes you! Now we are going to hang you, we can't stand you any longer." And he, the story goes, answered: "Drop it, peasants, that's a nasty job you've begun. You have already taken from me the things I've stolen, so that you have lost nothing. Anyway, you can always get new things, but where will you get such a fellow as I? Who will cheer you up when I'm gone?" "All right," they said, "talk on." They took him to the wood to hang him and he began to sing on the way. When they first started out, they walked fast, then they slowed up. When they came to the wood, though the rope was ready, they waited, until he should finish his last song. Then they said to one another: "Let him sing another song. It will do for his Last Communion." He sang another and then another, and then the sun rose. The men looked about them; a clear day was rising from the east. Migun stood smiling among them awaiting his death without fear. The peasants became abashed. "Well, fellows, let him go to the devil," they said. "If we hang him, we might have all kinds of sins and troubles on our heads for it." And they decided not to touch Migun. "We bow to the ground before you for your talent," they said, "but for your thieving we ought to beat you up, all the same." They gave him a light beating, and then they all went back in a body with him. All this might have been made up, but it speaks well for human beings, and puts Savelko in a good light. And then think of this: if people can make up such good stories, it follows they are not so bad, and in this lies the whole point. Not only did they sing songs together, but Savelko and Larion carried on long conversations with each other--often about the devil. They did not give him much honor. Once I remember the sexton saying: "The devil is the image of your own wickedness, the reflection of your own dark soul." "That means, he is my own foolishness?" Savelko asked. "Just that and nothing else." "It must be so," Migun said, laughing. "For were he alive, he would have snatched me up long ago!" Larion didn't believe in devils at all. I remember him discussing in the barn with the Dissenters and he shouting: "It is not devilish, but brutish! Good and evil are in man. When you want goodness, goodness is there; _if_ you want evil, evil is there, from you and for you. God does not force you by His Will either to good or evil. He created you free-willed, and you are free to do both good and evil. Your devil is misery and darkness! Good is really something human, because it springs from God, while your evil doesn't come from the devil, but from the brute in you." They shouted at him: "Red-haired heretic!" But he kept on. "That's why," he said, "the devil is painted with horns and feet like a goat's, because he is the brute element in man."