Page:Henryk Sienkiewicz - Potop - The Deluge (1898 translation by Jeremiah Curtin) - Vol 1.djvu/513

Rh "I said that the first moment!" cried Zagloba. "All were frightened, but I thought, 'That cannot be!' I saw the position at once. Come! hurry, Yan, hurry! Those men out there are confused. Aha!"

Zagloba and Pan Yan hastened to the ramparts, occupied already by the troops, and began to pass along. Zagloba's face was radiant; he stopped every little while, and cried so that all heard him, —

"Gracious gentlemen, we have guests! I have no reason to lose heart! If that is Radzivill, I'll show him the road back to Kyedani!"

"We'll show him!" cried the army.

"Kindle fires on the ramparts! We will not hide ourselves; let them see us, we are ready! Kindle fires!"

Straightway they brought wood, and a quarter of an hour later the whole camp was flaming, till the heavens grew red as if from daybreak. The soldiers, turning away from the light, looked into the darkness in the direction of Bobrovniki. Some of them cried that they heard a clatter and the stamp of horses.

Just then in the darkness musket-shots were heard from afar. Zagloba pulled Pan Yan by the skirts.

"They are beginning to fire!" said he, disquieted.

"Salutes!" answered Pan Yan.

After the shots shouts of joy were heard. There was no reason for further doubt; a moment later a number of riders rushed in on foaming horses, crying, —

"Pan Sapyeha! the voevoda of Vityebsk!"

Barely had the soldiers heard this, when they rushed forth from the walls, like an overflowed river, and ran forward, roaring so that any one hearing their voices from afar might think them cries from a town in which victors were putting all to the sword.

Zagloba, wearing all the insignia of his office, with a baton in his hand and a heron's feather in his cap, rode out under his horse-tail standard, at the head of the colonels, to the front of the fortifications.

After a while the voevoda of Yityebsk at the head of his officers, and with Yolodyovski at his side, rode into the lighted circle. He was a man already in respectable years, of medium weight, with a face not beautiful, but wise and kindly. His mustaches, cut evenly over his upper lip, were iron-gray, as was also a small beard, which made him resemble a foreigner, though he dressed in Polish