Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/598

 160 from hunters speaking Polish that he was on Mazovian ground at last.

It was easier there, though eastern Mazovia was one rustling wilderness. Uninhabited places had not ended yet; still, wherever there was a house, the inhabitants were less morose,—perhaps because they had not met with continual hatred, and perhaps, too, because Hlava spoke a language understood by them. His only trouble was the immense curiosity of those people, who surrounded the horsemen in crowds and overwhelmed them with questions.

"Give him to us, we will take care of him!" said they, on learning that the prisoner was a Knight of the Cross.

And they begged so persistently that Hlava was forced often to be angry, or to explain that the prisoner belonged to Prince Yanush. Then they yielded. Later on, in a region inhabited by nobles and land-tillers, it did not go easily either. Hatred was seething there against the Knights of the Order, for people remembered vividly in all places the treachery and wrong inflicted on the prince when in time of profound peace the Knights seized him in Zlotoria and held him prisoner. They did not wish, it is true, "to do justice" there to Siegfried, but this or that sturdy noble said: "Unbind him. I will give him a weapon and call him to death inside a barrier." Into the head of those, Hlava drove the idea as with a spade that the first right to vengeance belonged to the ill-fated master of Spyhov, and that they were not free to take that right from him.

In settled regions the journey was easy, for there were roads of some kind, and the horses were fed everywhere with oats and barley. Hlava drove quickly, therefore, halting in no place, and ten days before Corpus Christi he was at Spyhov.

He arrived in the evening, as he had when Matsko sent him back from Schytno with tidings of his departure for the Jmud land, and, just as on that day, Yagenka, seeing him from the window, ran down quickly. He fell at her feet, unable to utter a word for some time; but she raised him and took the man upstairs as quickly as possible, not wishing to ask questions before people.

"What news?" inquired she, quivering from impatience, and hardly able to catch her breath. "Are they alive? Are they well?"

"They are alive! they are well."

"And she?—have they found her?"