“Of course I have,” replied Napoleonder; “a man can’t live without a soul.”

“There! you see!” said the soldier.  “You have a soul, and you believe in God.  How, then, can you say you don’t know any such thing as pity?  You do know!  And I believe that at this very moment, deep down in your heart, you are mortally sorry for me; only you don’t want to show it.  Why, then, did you kill me?”

Napoleonder suddenly became furious.  “May the pip seize your tongue, you miscreant!  I’ll show you how much pity I have for you!” And, drawing a pistol, Napoleonder shot the wounded soldier through the head.  Then, turning to his dead men, he said:  “Did you see that?”

“We saw it,” they replied; “and as long as it is so, we are your faithful servants always.”

Napoleonder rode on.

At last night comes; and Napoleonder is sitting alone in his golden tent.  His mind is troubled, and he can’t understand what it is that seems to be gnawing at his heart.  For years he has been at war, and this is the first time such a thing has happened.  Never before has his soul been so filled with unrest.  And to-morrow morning he must begin another battle—­the last terrible fight with the Tsar Alexander the Blessed, on the field of Borodino.

“Akh!” he thinks, “I’ll show them to-morrow what a leader I am!  I’ll lift the soldiers of the Tsar into the air on my lances and trample their bodies under the feet of my horses.  I’ll make the Tsar himself a prisoner, and I’ll kill or scatter the whole Russian people.”

But a voice seemed to whisper in his ear:  “And why?  Why?”

“I know that trick,” he thought.  “It’s that same wounded soldier again.  All right.  I won’t give in to him.  ‘Why?  Why?’ As if I knew why!  Perhaps if I knew why I shouldn’t make war.”

He lay down on his bed; but hardly had he closed his eyes when he saw by his bedside the wounded soldier—­young, fair-faced, blond-haired, with just the first faint shadow of a mustache.  His forehead was pale, his lips were livid, his blue eyes were dim, and in his left temple there was a round black hole made by the bullet from his—­Napoleonder’s—­pistol.  And the ghastly figure seemed to ask again, “Why did you kill me?”

Napoleonder turns over and over, from side to side, in his bed.  He sees that it’s a bad business.  He can’t get rid of that soldier.  And, more than all, he wonders at himself.  “What an extraordinary occurrence!” he thinks.  “I’ve killed millions of people, of all countries and nations, without the least misgiving; and now, suddenly, one miserable soldier comes and throws all my ideas into a tangle!”

Finally Napoleonder got up; but the confinement of his golden tent seemed oppressive.  He went out into the open air, mounted his horse, and rode away to the place where he had shot to death the vexatious soldier.

“I’ve heard,” he said to himself, “that when a dead man appears in a vision, it is necessary to sprinkle earth on the eyes of the corpse; then he’ll lie quiet.”