He pulled his long Cossack forelock and gave an awkward bow.
"Madam, we must strike the Vistula and make for Grodno, or Vilno."
"What? Tramp four hundred versts?" She was horrified. "We haven't as much as a horse, let alone a cart."
"Four hundred versts," he repeated. "I did not know. I don't see how we are to reach Warsaw before it is German." He turned to Ian. "Do you, sir, help me lay my little horse in its grave. Then we can decide."
Hastily they put it into a trench, and the Cossack kicked earth over it, telling his story, meanwhile, in odd, broken Polish, of which he was very proud. He had been captured by the Prussians not far from Ruvno, and taken to the Vistula, he was not clear where, to be sent by water into Germany. But their boat was shelled by the Russians and wrecked. Like all Cossacks he was an expert swimmer and he swam up against the tide, got ashore near a wood and struck the high road from Thorn to Warsaw. He had been riding since early morning and Sietch was already much tried when they were captured.
But for all his advocating the Grodno route, he seemed loathe to leave his new friends and strike out done when he saw that they were bent upon trying to get to Sohaczev. I think the knowledge, gathered from their talk amongst themselves, that Ian knew every by-way and short-cut to that town--for much of the way lay on his own land--impressed him.
"I am strange to this country," he explained. "I might not find the river, to strike across country into Lithuania, and four hundred versts is a long way."
"You will come up with your friends once you cross the river," said Ian. "The Russians still held the right bank of the Vistula, this evening."
"Have you no horses?" he asked.
Vanda told him that Ruvno and its contents lay under a wreckage of brick and stone. Ian turned to his mother.