As my people in leather coats lay down, they merged with the earth — they couldn't be distinguished from the hummocks, their grey sheepskins became one with the beaten down autumn grass.
In this way we waited quite a long time. Above the marshland floated the moon, from time to time some blue sparks flashed there, the fog sometimes became a compact, low sheet up to the knees, sometimes it slowly moved away again.
They, as always, appeared unexpectedly. Twenty misty horsemen on twenty misty horses. Their approach noiseless and terrifying. A silent mass moved on us. The bits did not ring, no human voices were heard. Capes were waving with the wind. The Hunt was dashing on. And at its head raced King Stach, his hat, as previously, pulled down over his face. We had expected them to come flying with the wind, but at about a hundred steps away they dismounted, spent much time near the horses' hoofs. When they moved on again, an altogether unexpected thunder of hoofs reached us, breaking into the silence.
Slowly they came nearer and nearer to us, they were already passing the quagmire and were riding up to the fence, but here they passed round it. Stach came riding straight towards me, and I could see his face, a face white as chalk.
When he was almost at my tree, I stepped forward, took his horse by the bridle. Simultaneously — with my left hand in which I clutched the riding-crop, — I moved his hat onto the back of his head.
It was Varona's face I saw — a face pale as death, eyes without a living light in them, large dead eyes.
So unexpected it was that he certainly did not know what to do, but I, to make up for it, knew very well what I should do.
“So you are King Stach?” I asked quietly, and hit him in the face with the riding-crop.
Varona's horse reared and dashed away from me into the group of horsemen.
At that very instant the guns thundered from the ambush, the torches blazed, and everything was in a whirl in a mad sea of fire. The horses reared, the horsemen fell, someone yelled in a heart-rending voice: I still remember only Michał's face as he cold-bloodedly took aim. A cone of bullets flashed out from a long gun. Then a young man's face floated in front of me, the face of that man with high cheek-bones; his long tresses of hair were falling down his forehead. The fellow was working with a pitchfork as on a threshing floor, then lifted it and with terrific strength thrust it into the belly of the rearing horse. The horseman, the horse, and the man fell down together. But I remained standing, and in spite of the fact that shots were already coming also from the Hunt, and that bullets were whistling overhead, I deliberately chose whom to shoot at from among the horsemen energetically surrounding me. Shots came pouring on them also from behind.
“Brothers, treachery!”
“Our galloping is over!”
“Save us!”
“Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!”
I saw fear on the faces of these bandits, and the joy of revenge took possession of me. They should have thought beforehand that the day of reckoning would come. I saw the mužyk with the club breaking into the thick of the fight, beating violent strokes with it. All the old fury, all the long-suffering now exploded in an attack of unheard of passion and fighting bravery. Somebody jerked off one of the hunters from his saddle and the horse dragged his head by the roots.
Within ten minutes all, in fact, was over. The riderless horses neighed horribly, the killed and wounded lay like sheaves on the ground, Varona alone, like the devil, dodged about among the mužyks, beating them off with a sword. His revolver he clutched between his teeth. He fought splendidly. Then he saw me. His face became distorted with such terrible hatred, that even now I remember it, and sometimes see in my dreams.
Having trampled down one of the peasants with his horse, he grabbed his revolver.
“Beware, you villain! You've taken her away from me! But there'll be no caresses for you!”
The peasant with the long whiskers pulled him by a leg and due only to that I didn't crash to the ground with a hole in my skull. Varona understood he would be pulled off his horse now, and firing point-blank, he killed the long-whiskered man on the spot.
And then I, having succeeded in reloading my revolver, sent all the six bullets into him. Varona, grasping at the air with his hands, reeled in his saddle, but nevertheless turned his horse around, knocked the high-cheek-boned man to the ground and dashed off in the direction of the swamp. He was all the time grasping at the air with his hands, but stayed in the saddie and together with it (the saddle-girth must have broken) slid down the side until he was hanging over the ground. The horse turned aside. Varona's head struck heavily against a stone post in the fence.
Varona flew out of his saddle, struck against the ground and remained lying motionless, dead.
