Page 295 - the-brothers-karamazov

He ran forward and met the flying stones to screen the
solitary boy. Three or four ceased throwing for a minute.
‘He began first!’ cried a boy in a red shirt in an angry
childish voice. ‘He is a beast, he stabbed Krassotkin in class
the other day with a penknife. It bled. Krassotkin wouldn’t
tell tales, but he must be thrashed.’
‘But what for? I suppose you tease him.’
‘There, he sent a stone in your back again, he knows you,’
cried the children. ‘It’s you he is throwing at now, not us.
Come, all of you, at him again, don’t miss, Smurov!’ and
again a fire of stones, and a very vicious one, began. The
boy on the other side of the ditch was hit in the chest; he
screamed, began to cry and ran away uphill towards Mi-
hailovsky Street. They all shouted: ‘Aha, he is funking, he is
running away. Wisp of tow!’
‘You don’t know what a beast he is, Karamazov, killing is
too good for him,’ said the boy in the jacket, with flashing
eyes. He seemed to be the eldest.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ asked Alyosha, ‘Is he a tell-tale
or what?’
The boys looked at one another as though derisively.
‘Are you going that way, to Mihailovsky?’ the same boy
went on. ‘Catch him up.... You see he’s stopped again, he is
waiting and looking at you.’
‘He is looking at you,’ the other boys chimed in.
‘You ask him, does he like a dishevelled wisp of tow. Do
you hear, ask him that!’
There was a general burst of laughter. Alyosha looked at
them, and they at him.

The Brothers Karamazov