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 the other side of the ditch was hit in the chest; he screamed, began to cry and ran away uphill towards Mihailovsky 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.

“Don’t go near him, he’ll hurt you,” cried Smurov in a warning voice.

“I shan’t ask him about the wisp of tow, for I expect you tease him with that question somehow. But I’ll find out from him why you hate him so.”

“Find out then, find out,” cried the boys laughing.

Alyosha crossed the bridge and walked uphill by the fence, straight towards the boy.

“You’d better look out,” the boys called after him; “he won’t be afraid of you. He will stab you in a minute, on the sly, as he did Krassotkin.”

The boy waited for him without budging. Coming up to him, Alyosha saw facing him a child of about nine years old. He was an undersized weakly boy with a thin long pale face, with large dark eyes that gazed at him vindictively. He was dressed in a rather shabby old overcoat, which he had monstrously outgrown. His bare arms stuck out beyond his sleeves. There was a large patch on the right knee of his trousers, and in his right boot just at the toe there was a big hole in the leather, carefully blackened with ink. Both the pockets of his great coat were weighed down with stones. Alyosha stopped two steps in front of him, looking inquiringly at him. The boy, seeing at once from Alyosha’s eyes that he wouldn’t beat him, became less defiant, and addressed him first.

“I am alone, and there are six of them. I’ll beat them all, alone!” he said suddenly, with flashing eyes.

“I think one of the stones must have hurt you badly,” observed Alyosha.