The explanation was finished, and at the fire silence set in; but for some time a sultry afternoon wind shook the limbs of the trees, which sounded more and more deeply. The air became stifling; on the edge of the horizon, black clouds appeared, dark in the centre, and shining with a copper-color on the edges.
Pan Adam walked away from the fire, and moved like one demented, without giving an account to himself of where he was going. At last he dropped with his face to the ground, and began to tear the earth with his nails, then to gnaw his own hands, and then to gasp as if dying. A convulsion twisted his gigantic body, and he lay thus for hours. The dragoons looked at him from a distance; but even Lusnia dared not approach him.
Concluding that the commandant would not be angry at him for not sparing the Tartars, the terrible sergeant, impelled by pure inborn cruelty, stuffed their mouths with grass, so as to avoid noise, and slaughtered them like bullocks. He spared Eliashevich alone, supposing that he would be needed to guide them. When he had finished this work, he dragged away from the fire the bodies, still quivering, and put them in a row; he went then to look at the commandant.
“Even if he has gone mad,” muttered Lusnia, “we must get that one.”
Midday had passed, the afternoon hours as well, and the day was inclining toward evening. But those clouds, small at first, occupied now almost the whole heavens, and were growing ever thicker and darker without losing that copper-colored gleam along the edges. Their gigantic rolls turned heavily, like millstones on their own axes; then they fell on one another, crowded one another, and pushing one another from the height, rolled in a dense mass lower and lower toward the earth. The wind struck at times, like a bird of prey with its wings, bent the cornel-trees and the dogwood to the earth, tore away a cloud of leaves, and bore it apart with rage; at times it stopped as if it had fallen into the ground. During such intervals of silence there was heard in the gathering clouds a certain ominous rattling, wheezing, rumbling; you would have said that legions of thunders were gathering within them and ranging for battle, grumbling in deep voices while rousing rage and fury in themselves, before they would burst out and strike madly on the terrified earth.
“A storm, a storm is coming!” whispered the dragoons to one another.
The storm was coming. The air grew darker each instant.
Then on the east, from the side of the Dniester, thunder rose and rolled with an awful outbreak along the heavens, till it went far away, beyond the Pruth; there it was silent for a moment, but springing up afresh, rushed toward the steppes of Budjyak, and rolled along the whole horizon.
First, great drops of rain fell on the parched grass. At that moment Pan Adam stood before the dragoons.
“To horse!” cried he, with a mighty voice.
And at the expiration of as much time as is needed to say a hurried “Our Father,” he was moving at the head of a hundred and fifty horsemen. When he had ridden out of the woods, he joined, near the herd of horses, the other half of his men, who had been standing guard at the field-side, to prevent any herdsmen from escaping by stealth to the camp. The dragoons rushed around the herd in the twinkle of an eye, and giving out wild shouts, peculiar to Tartars, moved on, urging before them the panic-stricken horses.
The sergeant held Eliashevich on a lariat, and shouted in his ear, trying to outsound the roar of the thunder—
“Lead us on dog blood, and straight, or a knife in thy throat!”
Now the clouds rolled so low that they almost touched the earth. On a sudden they burst, like an explosion in a furnace, and a raging hurricane was let loose; soon a blinding light rent the darkness, a thunderclap came, and after it a second, a third; the smell of sulphur spread in the air, and again there was darkness. Terror seized the herd of horses. The beasts, driven from behind by the wild shouts of the dragoons, ran with distended nostrils and flowing mane, scarcely touching the earth in their onrush; the thunder did not cease for a moment; the wind roared, and the horses raced on madly in that wind, in that darkness, amid explosions in which the earth seemed to be breaking. Driven by the tempest and by vengeance, they were like a terrible company of vampires or evil spirits in that wild steppe.
Space fled before them. No guide was needed, for the herd ran straight to the camp of the Tartars, which was nearer and nearer. But before they had reached it, the storm was unchained, as if the sky and the earth had gone mad. The whole horizon blazed with living fire, by the gleam of which were seen the tents standing on the steppe; the world was quivering from the roar of thunders; it seemed that the clouds might burst any moment and tumble to the earth. In fact, their sluices were opened, and floods of rain began to deluge the steppe. The downfall was so dense that a few paces distant nothing could be seen, and from the earth, inflamed by the heat of the sun, a thick mist was soon rising.
Yet a little while, and herd and dragoons will be in the camp.
But right before the tents the herd split, and ran to both sides in wild panic; three hundred breasts gave out a fearful shriek; three hundred sabres glittered in the flame of the lightning, and the dragoons fell on the tents.
Before the outburst of the torrent, the Tartars saw in the lightning-flashes the oncoming herd; but
